Is That Dress White and Gold Or Blue and Black?

HughPickens.com writes Color scientists already have a word for it: Dressgate. Now the Washington Post reports that a puzzling thing happened on Thursday night consuming millions — perhaps tens of millions — across the planet and trending on Twitter ahead of even Jihadi John's identification. The problem was this: Roughly three-fourths of people swore that this dress was white and gold, according to BuzzFeed polling but everyone else said it's dress was blue. Others said the dress could actually change colors. So what's going on? According to the NYT our eyes are able to assign fixed colors to objects under widely different lighting conditions. This ability is called color constancy. But the photograph doesn't give many clues about the ambient light in the room. Is the background bright and the dress in shadow? Or is the whole room bright and all the colors are washed out? If you think the dress is in shadow, your brain may remove the blue cast and perceive the dress as being white and gold. If you think the dress is being washed out by bright light, your brain may perceive the dress as a darker blue and black.

According to Beau Lotto, the brain is doing something remarkable and that's why people are so fascinated by this dress. "It's entertaining two realities that are mutually exclusive. It's seeing one reality, but knowing there's another reality. So you're becoming an observer of yourself. You're having tremendous insight into what it is to be human. And that's the basis of imagination." As usual xkcd has the final word. It would make the comments more informatively scannable if you include your perceived color pair in the title of any comments below.

Comments

White balance and contrast in camera.

[Z00L00K]

It's primarily an effect of the camera fooling around with the white balance and contrast/light to try to get a correct image and failed.

Add to it that the picture looks different depending on which display you have on your computer and you have a nice debate.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[jrumney]

Not depending on which display so much, but with LCD displays, depending more on what angle you are looking at. Look at it straight on, and the dress is white and gold. Ask the person next to you, and they will tell you it is blue and black. Turn your screen towards them and the effect will be reversed.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[drinkypoo]

When I see stuff like that, my brain corrects the image for me.

Are people who are seeing this dress as weird colors just defective?

(I'm defective in other ways, like a lack of modesty, and some respiratory issues, let's not get all twisted here)

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[itzly]

That doesn't explain why two people looking at the same photo swear they see totally different colors.

Re: White balance and contrast in camera.

[Hardhead_7]

It's not just that. It flipped for me. I saw it Friday morning abd, saved the pic to my PC so I could open it up and use a color picker to see it was actually blue when it looked white/gold to me. Later that day, I was going to show it to a co-worker so I opened it up again. But now it was blue/black. It'd flipped twice more for me since then.

Curiously, the xkcd comic doesn't fool my eyes at all.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[jrumney]

It depends

1. on the angle you are looking at the screen (on a phone, from the side, or a laptop tilting your screen back further, it definitely looks black and blue, straight on, see the other factors below).
2. whether you see the top of it first and scroll down to the rest of the image, or you see the bottom first and scroll up (I think because the top neck area is definitely gold, but the colors of the dress in the photo definitely have a blue tinge to them)
3. whether you perceive the light source behind as a window or a mirror (your brain adjusts the white balance of the dress accordingly)

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[drinkypoo]

The thing is, in the provided picture, the dress actually IS white and gold, or at least grey and gold. Load it up in an editor and snip pieces of it out if you don't believe me, look at them on their own, compare them to color swatches. That doesn't make the dress any particular color. It makes the picture a particular color. The "white"/"black" part is banging right around 50%, which is clearly neither white nor black.

The camera diddled the image, maybe it was diddled even more before we actually saw it. Then we're all amazed that it doesn't look like the thing. But people have accidentally been taking pictures of things which don't look like things since time immemorial. They're called shitty pictures.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[jpapon]

From any angle, it looks blue to me. Very distinctly blue. I'm actually somewhat baffled that anyone (nevermind the majority of people) perceives it as white and gold.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[jpapon]

The thing is, in the provided picture, the dress actually IS white and gold, or at least grey and gold

I'm sorry, but it is definitely not. I just opened it up in GIMP, and the blue areas have hue values between 225 and 230. While yes, the saturation is low (30-40), that definitely still makes it blue, albeit a washed out blue.

Load it up in an editor and snip pieces of it out if you don't believe me, look at them on their own, compare them to color swatches

I did. It's definitely blue. Not highly saturated blue, but blue nonetheless. It's certainly not white/grey.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[markdavis]

>"Not depending on which display so much, but with LCD displays, depending more on what angle you are looking at. Look at it straight on, and the dress is white and gold"

Well, in my case, when I look at the photo in any light, on any monitor, at any angle, at any time, I have and have always seen only light blue and brown/gold. There is no situation where it is either "blue and black" or "white and gold".

The question is what we see in the photo, not what the dress ACTUALLY is- we can't know that because all we are allowed to see is a [poor] PHOTO of the dress, not the actual dress. And it is obvious the camera white balance and exposure is way off, trying to compensate for something, resulting in a photo with a probably very false representation.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[wonkey_monkey]

The thing is, in the provided picture, the dress actually IS white [...] or at least grey [...]

What's your definition of "IS" here? Because the only objective measure I can think of is to look at the RGB values, and pretty much every pixel in the "blue" area has a B value about 20%-30% higher than the R or G value. That, to me, makes it about as objectively blue as it's possible to be.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[caseih]

It's actually gold/black, white/blue. The real dress is dark black in the areas that people, including me, see as gold (and the rgb values are in fact gold), and the areas that people see as white (rgb values are highly saturated blue) are in fact dark blue.

Agreed that the picture is rubbish.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[thegarbz]

No parent is right, it depends on which display. Only one LCD technology has the ability to screw up colours with viewing angles so spectacularly. On any IPS or PVA display the viewing angles won't mess up the colours. My girlfriend said blue and black from her laptop which has a TN display, then changed her mind when she saw it on the desktop with an IPS display.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[jrumney]

The black is the bit that looks "gold". The "white" part is actually blue. Once I realised that the oversaturated light source behind was a reflection of the flash in a mirror (you can see more evidence of flash reflection on the dress itself), and not the sun shining through a window, my brain started processing the image totally differently, and I can no longer see it as white and gold unless I scroll the image so I can only see the top 20%.

Re: White balance and contrast in camera.

[Coisiche]

I'd also heard, that much like the rotating ballerina silhouette where you can change your perception of the direction of rotation, it is possible to change your perception of the colours in that photo. I couldn't do it though, stays white and gold.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[BarbaraHudson]

Doesn't happen to me. It's always blue-purple and a muddy black. Even directly in front of a 26" screen centered at eye level. And even after blocking off the obviously over-exposed background. That's what you get when to take a picture with a crap camera in lousy lighting - something ambiguous.

Re: White balance and contrast in camera.

[jrumney]

Curiously, the xkcd comic doesn't fool my eyes at all.

Which makes me curious - which pair of colours are the two dresses in the xkcd comic to you?

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[beuges]

This morning, I saw it on my phone in my darkened bedroom, and it was clearly blue and brown. Just now, I opened the Washington Post link on my 24" screen in a sunlit room, and it was clearly white and gold. I then found the link that I had seen on my phone this morning (not Washington Post, so I wanted to confirm that it just wasn't two different pictures that I was looking at), opened it up, and it was white and gold there too. Went back to my bedroom and closed the curtains, and it remained white and gold for a bit, but after I left the room (after my eyes had adjusted a bit to the darkness), it was blue and brown again. The picture on the Washington Post was also now blue and brown. Now that my eyes have adjusted to the sunlit room again (and the white Slashdot background), I switch back to the Washington Post tab, and it's white and gold again. My wife (who's now gotten fed up with following me around to look at this picture under different lighting conditions) has had pretty much the same experience as me.

So it appears to be linked to the lighting conditions that your eyes are adjusted to when seeing the image initially... even after they've adjusted to the ambient light, the brain appears to stick to the image it created initially.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Anonymous Coward]

When I initially saw it, I saw white/gold, but some of the people posting twitter were sitting right beside each other and looking at the same screen and seeing two different things.

As for the color purity, no I never saw it as a pure white, I always saw it as slightly blue, but the gold color was a gold color. After seeing what the dress is supposed to look like and another photo of the same person wearing the dress, I was kinda baffled how anyone was seeing it black and blue but then suddenly I did see it and I was like, WHAT THE.

But most of the times when I look back at it it's still white/gold. So there is definitely a contrast aspect to it.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Anonymous Coward]

There are multiple photos of this thing, all photoshopped. I saw a video of the dress this morning. The actual dress is apparently blue and black... But in the same video, they show other dresses with the same style but different colors on nearby racks, so there may be a white and good version out there. FYI, I only saw the washed out photoshopped versions until this morning.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[itzly]

I did. It's definitely blue. Not highly saturated blue, but blue nonetheless. It's certainly not white/grey.

Agreed, but white objects in the shade under a blue sky are usually blue. Look at the white snow under the trees, for instance. http://khongthe.com/wallpapers...

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw it as hot pink and emerald green.

Unfortunately, I made the mistake of telling that to my psychiatrist, and that's why I'm typing this from a padded cell.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[jrumney]

You actually need the overexposed background there to fool your brain into thinking the dress is underexposed to see the blue as white, and the black as gold.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[dAzED1]

given that a color sensor on a digital camera is only sensing RGB (sometimes 1 or 2 more...) and that most monitors are only doing the same....just what would you expect white or grey to be, in the end? How would it be "captured" as an image if not by a sensor which can only detect R, G, or B?

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Yomers]

Because what we perceive as the color of some surface is really a reflection of ambient light from that surface. So color of the surface would change depending on color of the light that it is reflecting. But our brain has auto white balance image preprocessing filter that fixes surface color for us based on light color , which is computed partially using our knowledge on what color things should normally have. In this picture dress could be white if it is not in a lighten by yellow colored light behind it, but lighten by blueish light source, and camera white balance is set somewhere in a middle. Otherwise it's blue.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[drinkypoo]

pretty much every pixel in the "blue" area has a B value about 20%-30% higher than the R or G value. That, to me, makes it about as objectively blue as it's possible to be.

Are you kidding? It's possible to be balanced far more towards blue. But also, gold is not a color. I learned back in my Amiga-using, pixel-editing days that there's a lot of blue in most metallics. I don't know if that's an artifact of what happens to light when it bounces off of them, or what, sorry. Not a physicist. But I know that if you're trying to make something look metallic, you're going to be adding some blue to it.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[dywolf]

i suspect a fair bit is related to the color temp setting of their monitors as well.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Applehu Akbar]

Looks absolutely, positively white/pale gold to me. And that was on three screens with a photographer's eye.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Fnord666]

So it appears to be linked to the lighting conditions that your eyes are adjusted to when seeing the image initially... even after they've adjusted to the ambient light, the brain appears to stick to the image it created initially.

Here is a pretty good explanation of why this might happen.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at it straight on, and the dress is white and gold. Ask the person next to you, and they will tell you it is blue and black.

We had the exact same perception issue on a 50" Panasonic Vierra Plasma TV.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Anonymous Coward]

I coworker printed a copy of it, and about half the office said gold/white and the other blue/black. Originally it was white and gold, but yesterday evening, I saw blue. Today, white and gold again.

All from a printed copy of. No screen involved.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[grnbrg]

Put it into to Photoshop and eye-dropper the colours. They are quantitatively light blue and dark brown.

But they can perceived as either blue and black or white and gold.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Anonymous Coward]

The definitive clue is in the almost perfectly specular reflection on the draped bits near the shoulders: This is clearly a reflection of the illuminating light, and it's a bluish color in the picture. Pick that as the white point and you get a white dress with golden-brown applications. For this to work it's important that you don't just pick a bright part on an item with unknown color. It has to be a "colorless" specular reflection, and it must not exceed the dynamic range of the camera. That's quite rare, so this technique can't be used very often, but here it works (only the blue channel is saturated, which is the reason for a light blue tint remaining after the correction).

The problem with this picture is that the background seems to be illuminated differently, by a warmer (lower color temperature, more yellowish) light than the dress in the foreground. You can make this easier for yourself if you cut away anything but the dress. Then you'll clearly see that it's a picture where the white balance is off (in terms that most people will find on their cameras, the camera balanced for "incandescent light" instead of "fluorescent light"), not a blue dress.

Re: White balance and contrast in camera.

[Anonymous Coward]

White and gold for me when I looked at it first. Scrolled to the second photo and it's blue and black. Scrolled back up and I can do whatever I want but I can only see the first image as black and blue now, whichever way I turn it or however many times I tell myself that it's white and gold like when I first saw it.

I think it might be a bit like with the Pink Floyd song Another brick in the wall. If you're German (like me) and someone tells you a story about how the song was mixed you may hear something other than the actual refrain. I had not heard the song before I heard the story. The story goes that the mixing was done by some German guy. He hanged himself in his attic but before that he changed the refrain (kids choir) to say "Hol ihn, hol ihn Unters Dach". Meaning roughly "get him under the roof". So when they sing "all in all it's just another brick in the wall" I now have to listen VERY carefully to not hear something else.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Anonymous Coward]

My son and wife see white and white while I see blue and black. Looking at the same display.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Jawnn]

No, you have an utterly mindless collection of noise, from a crowd of people who don't understand the rather simple science involved here. Is it any wonder that we have so many climate change deniers or anti-vaxers in the world?

Re: White balance and contrast in camera.

[Hardhead_7]

Blue and black. I don't know why it doesn't trick me, I usually fall for optical illusions. It's not like I have particularly good color perception or anything.

Re: White balance and contrast in camera.

[Hardhead_7]

I can't control it. It's "flipped" for me three times. I've tried to do different tricks like viewing angles or imagining it one way before I look, but nothing works.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone who doesn't see that this is a mismatch between the light on the dress and the automatic white balance chosen by the camera, probably caused by the light in the background, has no hope of ever becoming a photographer. I've corrected worse tints in pictures with inhomogeneous illumination, where people wouldn't even believe that there could have been a problem after being shown the result.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[wiredlogic]

It's definitely that. I first saw it on the news in a hotel lobby and it was clearly blue and black there. Now, viewing the original stills on my monitor it is blue-tinged white (bad white-balance) and gold. I can get it to shift toward darker blue and gold by changing my viewing angle to the LCD.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[wonkey_monkey]

Are you kidding?

No, I'm not kidding, just trying to be objective about it.

It's possible to be balanced far more towards blue.

It's also possible to be get quite a bit closer to grey, so I think to claim that the dress "actually IS white/grey" is pushing it a bit. Compare the disputed "blue/white" parts of the image to an actual grey of the same intensity side-by-side and I don't there's any way someone with normal eyesight could fail to see the difference.

But also, gold is not a color.

I don't remember saying it was...

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Oligonicella]

Yes, the photo was washed out and so looked different than the physical dress. Agreed.

Gold, however, is a color. Just like seafoam green contains blue, so does gold - at least, once you introduce lighting changes. That's how you shade a color, add or subtract amounts of each color (gold is FFD700, defined by HTML standards). It's just one of those many thousands of colors that aren't anywhere near primary or secondary. Brick red, tangerine and slate blue are all like that yet are still considered colors.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[michelcolman]

The definitive clue is in the almost perfectly specular reflection on the draped bits near the shoulders: This is clearly a reflection of the illuminating light, and it's a bluish color in the picture. Pick that as the white point and you get a white dress with golden-brown applications.(...)Then you'll clearly see that it's a picture where the white balance is off (in terms that most people will find on their cameras, the camera balanced for "incandescent light" instead of "fluorescent light"), not a blue dress.

Great theory, except for the fact that the company that makes the dress has confirmed that it's blue and black.

When I first saw it, I was completely convinced it was blue and black. But then later that day, I saw it again and it was definitely white and gold. I couldn't believe I had ever seen it as blue and black. Ambient light and monitor color settings definitely change the perception. When you see the dress as white and gold, looking at the bright spot at the lower right of the picture makes the dress start to turn blue. Dimming the monitor also helps.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Lonewolf666]

Using a Samsung SyncMaster 204B here. In dim lighting conditions.

Looking at the picture from a "normal" angle (approximately from the front and with the screen slightly below eye level), the dress looks black and blue to me. But if I look down on the screen at an angle of maybe 70 degrees, the blue becomes sort of white and the black lace gets a bit of a golden hue. Still not clearly white and gold, but I see how one could get the idea.

Now the SyncMaster 204B is seven years old and probably not quite state of the art anymore. And it took me a rather unusual viewing angle to get anywhere near "white and gold". The people who saw the dress as white and gold must have pretty shitty screens ;)

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[dos1]

You're mistaken. The proper point to look at searching for white reference is in lower left part of the image - there's a part of some other, clearly black and white dress visible, and it has obvious orange - not blue - tint. Also, it's not hard to find other pictures of the same dress. There's also somewhere a confirmation of the taker of that photo saying that this dress is obviously blue and black. https://gs1.wac.edgecastcdn.ne... http://s3-ec.buzzfed.com/stati...

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Anonymous Coward]

That may be the case, but as far as this image goes, the black area is the part that appears to be gold, not the blue area.

When the blue shifts to white, the black shifts to gold.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Anonymous Coward]

>They're called shitty pictures.

Amen.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Bite The Pillow]

Look at a few pictures of white clothing under a black light, and then look at the dress again.

The blue color is very close to black lit white, and you may trick your brain into seeing it as such.

Re: White balance and contrast in camera.

[brianerst]

I can switch the perspectives if I scroll the picture. If the picture comes into frame from the top (shoulders), it's white/gold. If the picture comes into the frame from the bottom (hem), it's blue/black. The top is far more "golden" while the bottom is far more "blue".

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no point in that picture which can be used as a white point (after the fact) and produce that blue dress. The programmer who wrote the white balance algorithm for that camera needs to stop working on image algorithms, because that white balance requires an assumption of the ambient light which is completely removed from anything any sane person would expect to encounter in the real world. If your white balance algorithm tells you that the light is almost completely blue, so crank up the gain of the red and green channels, you ignore the result and assume 6500K. At least that way the photographer has a fighting chance to correct the white balance afterwards. That said, I stand corrected, but I still maintain that if you see that kind of blue dress (and not just a light pastel blue) in that picture, have your eyes checked.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Camel Pilot]

I am fairly convinced that those that claim the dress to be "distinctly blue" are just trolling the rest and extracting some weird sort of pleasure from it. The interesting aspect of this story is that there are sooo many people willing to troll others.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[cerberusti]

My gf and I looked at it on the same screen.

My answer was periwinkle and brown for the image, but I thought the real dress was probably blue and black. She says white and gold.

I had to spend a moment looking at the background to determine that it was probably blue and black.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[TheRaven64]

Zoom right in on the bits that you think are white, so that they fill your entire monitor. They're obviously blue. For a lot of us, that's the colour that we see when we look at it in context as well. I can see how you'd interpret it as being white by overcompensating for the colour in the bottom right, but that doesn't stop you from being wrong. The gold bits are gold when you zoom in (mostly, some are black), but a shiny black often looks yellow-gold in overexposed photos.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Bite The Pillow]

People seeing it for the first time, on the same device, in the same room for several hours, see different colors.

Your experience is not enough to draw any conclusion from.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[EvilSS]

So it appears to be linked to the lighting conditions that your eyes are adjusted to when seeing the image initially... even after they've adjusted to the ambient light, the brain appears to stick to the image it created initially.

Here is a pretty good explanation of why this might happen.

Something is wrong. You said "pretty good explanation" but you then linked to Gizmodo. These two things are mutually exclusive.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Applehu Akbar]

In fact I did try to Save As the jpg given in the Tumblr reference, but it was in some weird-ass DRMed format that made it unviewable even in Photoshop.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Baloroth]

Yeah, and that's kinda the whole point: everyone who looks at the photo is automatically (and completely subconsciously, without realizing it) applying color-correction to the dress, based on the brain's similar experiences with color-correcting and the visual clues in the picture. What makes the picture interesting is that it's so close to the edge between white/gold and blue/black that different people can perceive it differently, even on the exact same screen. Actually, I've seen it both ways, though I believe the picture that I saw as white/gold was ever so slightly lightened (based on a totally not scientific color picking of the blue areas). The picture was also a smaller version, which may have made the difference. The point is, the picture is a fascinating example of how what humans really perceive is not what they're actually seeing, but a heavily interpreted version based on context and various visual clues. In fact, humans would be effectively blind without that processing (imagine face blindness, but for everything you see).

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Anonymous Coward]

So it appears to be linked to the lighting conditions that your eyes are adjusted to when seeing the image initially

Bingo. I woke up when it was on the news early in the morning before my eyes had adjusted but the light hit them (bad morning) and it was clearly gold and white. I went back to bed and the sun moved and the same news story came on and it was the proper colour then, blue.

So I got curious if they were showing the same image maybe with some colour changes and viewed it on a few monitors and even saved it to insure. I can clearly see both versions of it depending on if my eyes have adjusted. We've all known this for awhile, why the default background for all Adobe products are that slate gray, I even had a boss paint the entire place that same colour because when your working on photography and the cones and rods are changing between light and dark areas you start to see colours differently and they will bleed. The gray sits in the middle and keeps the eye from having to adjust.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[serviscope_minor]

Well, the best explanation is that our brain does very, very hefty colour correction on its own. The reason is probably so we can ignore the irrelevant information, i.e. the light colour and any sensitivity lag between the different cones and identify objects.

If you've ever tried to do colour computer vision you will be *astonished* at how good we are at it.

Anyway, my guess is that the reason for this one appearing as two different things is it's very close to some threshold. It's possible to interpret it as more or less normal colours under a blueish light (i.e, sunlight), which makes you perceive the blueish grey as white. Or, you perceive it as blue under washed out much more orange light (e.g. incandescent bulbs) in which case you perceive the blueish grey as blue. The "white/blue" colour is objectively blueish grey if you check the actual hex values: it's mostly grey but the blue channel is a bit higher, but not by that much.

Our brains seem to model the complete co varying of the colours so once you decide what the light colour is, this effects the perception of all the colours. Black is nevertruly black and always reflects some light, so once the brain has decided the blue is super washed out by excessive light and that light is orange, that makes bright orangish things perceived as black since that's how black would appear under those circumstances. Given the rather good corrections of the picture, it appears those people are correct (though I'm on the white/gold side).

These two perceptions are very, very different and so it's kind of a binary thing, either you perceive one or the other. Now, I suspect that this photo is very close to the tipping point which is why some people perceive it very differently from others.

Either way, it's a fascinating example of colour interpretation.

This one is also excellent:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[The Rizz]

I can only see it as blue, period. Not trolling - I really cannot see this as white in any circumstances, even the XKCD "color balanced" bit I still see it as blue (albeit a much lighter blue on the left).

Maybe this has more to do with some effect similar to color-blindness? There are more types of color-blindness than just the standard red-green, and they have different effects on how colors are seen (and some kinds of color blindness can actually make you see other colors better). Maybe this dress has highlighted a previously unknown type of color-blindness?

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[drinkypoo]

(gold is FFD700, defined by HTML standards).

HA HA HA! YOU FELL INTO MY TRAP!

Pardon my caps, but I set a lot of these, and they are rarely stepped in so beautifully. That's my fault, of course. But, here we go.

When you hear the name of a color, you think of some color which you associate with that, or a thing which you think of as being that color which actually has a whole texture, reflectivity, depth, etc. But the truth is that the same name is being used right now by a dozen different paint companies to describe a dozen different colors, which are then described in thousands of different ways by the downstream users of the paint. There are some absolute color standards based on elements, oxides of the same and the like, but even those are frequently "abused". The truth, though, is that outside of a small handful of colors, they are not defined by any unifying principle. Your use of the HTML standards is particularly hilariously perfect, I really hope that you meant to put your foot there! Outside of web design, nobody but nobody gives a crap about that. Before that, we had the X rgb.txt file, which nobody outside of X-land cared about, which begat HTML colors by the way, junior. But meanwhile, over in the land of professional color, there were multiple competing color standards including AGFA and Pantone — and there still are.

It's interesting that part of this debate is also over the color "black" because "black" is what you see when you don't see anything, and if any part of the dress were truly black then the photograph would look like an editing mistake. Even the color black is subjective. That should be intuitively obvious to a web designer (who else would even mention HTML colors?) who has to deal with the real-world effects of differing black and white levels all day. I may be sitting at a monitor with 120% color (Adobe gamma) but I don't expect other people to have them. As far as I know, there is no color correction e.g. for Android which is not manual, and then the color adjustments become utterly perceptual.

I suspect that celebs are adept at perceiving the actual color of the dress because they have appeared in so many washed-out photographs.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[pr0fessor]

That's what I saw when I opened it in gimp but imagine it is still white and gold and that the photo appears blue because of reflected light. Which is one of those things that happen with some materials used in womens clothing. It is often an intentional effect like a white cami with a little sheen that will reflect the colors of the other garments they are wearing. My wife has a few of those A.K.A goes with just about anything.

Re: White balance and contrast in camera.

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people would call that off-white. I've seen snow bluer than that.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Ogive17]

Whew, I thought I was the odd ball. That is exactly how I would describe what I see.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Wycliffe]

So it appears to be linked to the lighting conditions that your eyes are adjusted to when seeing the image initially... even after they've adjusted to the ambient light, the brain appears to stick to the image it created initially.

This isn't what happened to me. The first time I saw it (before I realized the controversy), it was clearly
white/gold but since then no matter how I look at it, it is clearly black/blue and I can't make it change
back to the white/gold. I tried finding the original picture I looked at which was white/gold but everything
in my history was now blue/black.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[serviscope_minor]

Well, I'd hesitate to call you colour blind since you are in fact correct. The dress really is blue and your brain is somehow undoing the mangling that's been done by the camera and lighting to arrive at the correct colour. I can't unsee it as white and gold however.

You can think of it all hinging on the blue/white stripes.

Objectively they're grey with a little blue in (check with a colour picker). All colour interpretation is ambiguous since you have do undo the effect of lighting and uneven colour sensors (eyes included). If your brain decides the light is white with a bit of blue, then that implies the underlying colour must be white and so the other colours must be gold.

If however your brain makes the call that it's strong orange light then that implies the stripes are in fact blue. That further implies the other stripes are dark grey, usually intrepreped as black.

There are other optical illusions designed to trigger this different intrepretation such as this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

What's unique about this is it's not made to trigger two different intrepretations in one person, but instead by chance triggeres quite evenly the different intrepretations in different people, leading to big debates.

For you, the XKCD one isn't extreme enough to push you in different directions. Interestingly high level intrepretation has a big part. I can't cite anything but I can give a personal anecdote. The other day I saw an odd green thing on the floor in my hotel room. It was actually my backpack lit with green tinged light, but was crumpled in an odd shape so I couldn't tell what it was. When I figured it was my backpack, I could no longer see it as green (the actual colour is black). I probably spent 5 minutes staring at it trying to re-see the green with no success. It's a good illustration that the brain uses information from all levels including high level information such as recognising a specific object that I know is in the room to intrepret light colour.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[beelsebob]

Nope, just different lighting conditions to you. The effect can be reproduced on absolutely perfect IPS displays, if you set up the lighting correctly.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[The Rizz]

Well, I'd hesitate to call you colour blind since you are in fact correct. The dress really is blue and your brain is somehow undoing the mangling that's been done by the camera and lighting to arrive at the correct colour. I can't unsee it as white and gold however.

I'd actually think it was the other way around - I'm less blue colorblind which is why I always see blue, regardless of surrounding context. You've got slight blue colorblindness which is why context causes you to interpret the blue as a different color.

The other day I saw an odd green thing on the floor in my hotel room. It was actually my backpack lit with green tinged light, but was crumpled in an odd shape so I couldn't tell what it was. When I figured it was my backpack, I could no longer see it as green (the actual colour is black).

This could indicate another possible explanation; that in many people the color you first see it as becomes the "right" color, and it becomes difficult/impossible to see it otherwise, as your brain has already interpreted it, and is remembering the "right" color even if you're trying to see it "wrong".

Re: White balance and contrast in camera.

[Anonymous Coward]

I see A blue tint I associate with the wrong white balance, poor lighting angle, and auto exposure optimizing the wrong thing.

Re: White balance and contrast in camera.

[Anonymous Coward]

Problem I have is that to me the dress is white and gold, my wife looks at the same picture, she sees blue and black.
Forget the white balancing, i have yet to read a valid explanation as to why some of us see that dress white and gold.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[rastos1]

Put it into to Photoshop and eye-dropper the colours.

Excuse me. Is GIMP good enough for that functionality?

--
On the internet nobody can hear you being subtle

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Anonymous Coward]

Put it into to Photoshop and eye-dropper the colours. They are quantitatively light blue and dark brown.

But they can perceived as either blue and black or white and gold.

You're assuming proper white balance at the time the photo was shot for the lighting conditions of the environment in which the photo was shot for your "quantitatively" assertion. Unless you were there or took the photo, you cannot say with any certainty.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Anonymous Coward]

We can actually. Here is the link --> http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00SJEUCWU/ref=tsm_1_fb_lk

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Anonymous Coward]

The point is that people interpret that particular photo in different ways. Pointing out some other photo of (allegedly) the same object is irrelevant if most people haven't seen that other photo.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Solandri]

I've been doing white balancing and level adjustments on my photos for over 20 years now. The dress as shown in the photo is white/gold (actually more of a light-blue/gold). You can confirm this with eyedropper measurements in Photoshop.

However, if you look at the sliver of background which appears to the right, you can tell the photo is badly overexposed. If your eye spotted this and your brain compensated for it by interpreting the pic as what might see if you stepped out into bright sunlight after being in a darkened room, the dress will appear blue/black.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[fatwilbur]

That's it, no more using words to describe the colors a person sees, only wavelength numbers allowed.

I don't know about all you other crazy people out there, but I clearly see 582 nanometers.

Re: White balance and contrast in camera.

[Cochonou]

Yes, it's about the same for me. I see it predominantly gold and white. However, I can see it black and blue if I first look at this white and gold dress, and then I scroll the image from the bottom. I guess it's because most of the orange illumination "hints" are in the lower part of the image.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Solandri]

This dress thing is actually a simplified version of a really powerful and freaky illusion which unfortunately only works in a darkened room. You take a quilt with different color squares. You can verify in white light that the different colors span the rainbow.

On top of this quilt, you lay a black piece of cardboard which has a cutout allowing you to only see one color patch. Say it's a greenish patch. In the darkened room with the single white light, you can confirm that this single visible patch is green.

Then you put colored filters in front of the light until the patch appears to be red/orange. The light is red/orange, so the green patch now appears red/orange. Makes sense right?

Then you remove the black cardboard so you can see all the color patches. And suddenly that red/orange patch appears green again. Cover it up with the black cardboard again and it'll appear red/orange. Remove the cardboard and it appears green.

What's going on (and also what's going on in the dress photo) is that your brain is using the information of surrounding objects (in the dress pic, it's the background visible to the right) to gauge the amount of light and the color of the light. It then corrects for the color of the light to white balance what you see, and for the brightness to compensate for over/under exposure. So the colors and intensity your eyes see remain the same, just how your brain interprets them changes.

Re: White balance and contrast in camera.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because of the light absorbed by the water molecules. Same reason the sky is blue I believe.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Anubis IV]

This is one of the key aspects of the case. The color of the pixels in the image is clearly blue. That's irrefutable. We can do a quick color analysis to figure that out, as you did.

But, unfortunately, that doesn't answer the question of what color the dress itself is. Just because the picture shows it as blue doesn't actually mean it is blue, and there are numerous illusions, color correction issues, or optical afterimage effects that could cause something that actually is color A to appear as color B, either to the camera or to us.

I'm firmly in the "the dress appears blue and brown/black but is actually white and gold" camp. There are numerous highlights in the image that cause the true color to pop out from under the blueish pall that is over the whole thing. You can see a more true gold up on the right side of the collar and along the top edges of some of the ridges. Likewise, you can see a truer white in various places where the light hits it more directly. Whether it looks blue and brown because there's something blue behind the camera that is reflecting a blue pall over the dress, or it looks blue and brown because of the white balance being out of whack on account of the massive backlighting going on, I don't know, but there's plenty of evidence in the image to suggest the dress itself is white and gold, even if it doesn't immediately appear that way in the image.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[q4Fry]

My wife asked me, and my answer was "black and .... blue, I guess?" I thought it was a trick question what shade of blue one would call it. Since hearing the point of the question, I can reliably identify the "black" as "muddy bronze," but the only way to trick my brain into thinking the dress is white (still with a blue cast) and gold is to take my wife's monitor and look at it from a 45 deg angle from the top. My monitor still looks blue from any angle.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[hey!]

I've sat right next to people who see the dress differently than me. It's *the same image* on *the same monitor* at *the same time*. So it's not a case of the monitor calibration or the camera white balance that creates the discrepancy, although obviously manipulating those things will change our individual perceptions of the dress. What's interesting here is the differences between people presented with an identical image.

Color doesn't exist in the external world. "Purple" isn't a wavelength of light, it's a kind of "additional data" tag which our brains add to parts of an image that allows us to extract more information from it. Consider the famous "Rubik's Cube" optical illusion where the same square looks either orange or brown based on whether contextual cues make us think it is in shadow or not. There's an illustration here.

The only difference between the Rubik's Cube illusion and The Dress That Broke The Internet is that practically *everyone* experiences the paradoxical sensations of the Rubik's Cube Illusion; in the case of the dress the paradox is in how sensations *differ between people*. The dress image is a kind of borderline case where our brains can "tag" the "pixels" of the image in one of two possible ways depending on what it thinks the context is. Different brains are trained by different experiences to expect different contexts. If we saw the dress being worn and in person, chances are with all that context there'd be less disagreement.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. It's an automatic white balance failure. I work on ISPs and getting AWB/AE/AF to produce good results for any arbitrary image is incredibly difficult since the results must be evaluated subjectively. Objective measurements will miss certain artifacts that humans easily pick out.

The only way to come close to knowing what color the dress is would be to have a Macbeth chart in the image but with multiple illuminants as in this image it's still difficult.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Anonymous Coward]

You're talking nonsense. You can see that but it has nothing to do with whether or not you perceive the dress initially as white/gold or blue/black. If I take a B&W picture you do not see it in color either.

Re: White balance and contrast in camera.

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends on what you mean by color as well. Current apparent color or color with the shadowed effect mentally undone? I see it as an actually white and gold dress that appears blue and bronze in the lighting.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen it on a number of different displays under different conditions, not because I'm particularly interested in the stupid dress, but because a number of different people wanted my opinion. Well, it was that it's blue and black, and that looking at the background it's probably even bluer and blacker in real life. They agreed but told me everyone on the internet told them otherwise. I told them the internet is full of trolls.
Anyway, I sort of hoped the thing would have blown over by now, but since it's on Slashdot, especially for you I looked for a better picture of the dress and found one: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-31656935 End of discussion.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[loufoque]

The color of the pixels is white and gold. The white is blue-ish of course, but the people who see the dress as white and gold can clearly see that.
People who see it as white and gold see the real colors of the pixels. People who see it as blue and black have their brain doing color compensation automatically.

I'd say the normal people are the one who see it white and gold...

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Anonymous Coward]

> There is no situation

But what if you were one of those insane Republicans? Their kind believes (or lies, as the case may be) that it is snow white and gold. They are liars. They are incapable of telling the truth. Next thing you know they're going to lie and say they see an image of the harlot mother of their god. They are crazy. That is why they lie and claim it is gold. They want us dead because they are so crazy. So crazy. This is more proof of it.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[brausch]

Basically, me too. I've seen it both ways. I actually saved the file on my desktop so I can be sure I'm looking at the same thing each time and it has flipped. I mostly see blue and black/brown, sometimes light blue and light brown, and rarely the pure white and gold. Pretty weird, but also pretty cool.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Goragoth]

I'm still befuddled by what the deal with this picture is. All I can see are the colours that you can confirm by going into any image editing program and checking the pixels: i.e. a light blue and a golden/brownish colour. Now some people are saying you should make some sort of judgement as to what colour the dress really is, when compensating for the bad exposure, to which I can just say: I don't know. There isn't actually enough information in the picture to make that call. I wonder why this isn't a more common answer; when you can't be sure of something "I don't know" is perfectly acceptable as an answer.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Anonymous Coward]

I was wondering if I was the only person seeing the dress as blue and gold

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Anonymous Coward]

No it's not. Read the article again.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[TMB]

You know it really is blue, right?

(the reviews, incidentally, are hysterical)

[TMB]

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Anonymous Coward]

The *actual* dress is blue and black. That's well established from other photos from the wedding, and from the amazon.co.uk listing of the dress.

Re: White balance and contrast in camera.

[shahlak]

It cannot be the display because I and my husband saw the pic on my mobile screen, his mobile screen as well as our laptop. No matter where, at what angle, light or time we see it, it always appears golden brown & white with blue tinge to me. My husband sees blue & black.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[neurocutie]

"Put it into to Photoshop and eye-dropper the colours. They are quantitatively light blue and dark brown." NO. As several of the neuroscientists interviewed have tried to explain, there is NO such thing as "quantitative color"". Color is a PERCEPTUAL phenomenon that is INTERNAL to the individual perceiver (human). Physics has nothing to say about color, and color is not a function of any simple physical or quantitative system. Color is certainly tied to wavelength or any other similar quantification of physical properties. You can't just make measurements using Photoshop and determine color (nevermind the FACT that there is no dependable mapping between RGB GUN values and actual photon/physical output of the display device you are using to look at the image).

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[kenshin33]

20 minutes ago I was white and gold (pic in 1st link). Now,it's blue and black.
My GF was next to me, and saw the opposite of what I saw.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you, but people are still baffled by when their car "changes" colors after being parked in parking lots with yellow-hued lighting.

In other words, if you have to explain it, perhaps it's getting explained to an audience that still hasn't figured out variances in vision after being exposed to a lifetime of optical illusions. This group doesn't fathom that what they see is an interpretation, it's real.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[markdavis]

WTF? You are the one insane...

Re: White balance and contrast in camera.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get it. You have a white background. Clearly the dress is not the same colour. Do you guys seeing the dress white see the background light red?

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Baloroth]

Everyone who looks at the photo will see the dress as *some* color. That's the point. It's not a conscious judgment, you see what your eyes/brain are telling you is there. Some people see it as white, some people see it as blue (and some people have seen it as both).

There isn't actually enough information in the picture to make that call.

But your brain does it anyways, because that's what your brain does.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[SeaFox]

The camera diddled the image, maybe it was diddled even more before we actually saw it. Then we're all amazed that it doesn't look like the thing. But people have accidentally been taking pictures of things which don't look like things since time immemorial. They're called shitty pictures.

This is what happens when publications fire their professional photographers and give their "reporters" (who skill-wise are glorified bloggers now) smartphones and tell them to take their own pictures, because that's much cheaper than hiring real pros. The sad part is they probably think this is all great. After all, they're getting a lot more page views over this stupid photo controversy than a properly taken picture of the dress would have attracted to their site.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Anonymous Coward]

Same for me. I can't even understand how people see it white. And I tried hard under different lighting conditions.

Re: White balance and contrast in camera.

[Anonymous Coward]

So people who see the dress as blue/black have more experience with crappy phone cameras (and image processing).

The dress, to me, appears gold/white (though the white has a slight blue tint). If one were to set their desktop background to the color of one "black" pixel of dress, I dare say they'd have a gold/brown desktop (not black).

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[BarbaraHudson]

Maybe the ones who see the dress white and gold are the same ones who's optic responses have been damaged by too much J. J. Abrams lens flare.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[hucker75]

Stick it in a photo editor and ask it what colour it is. It's white (with a faint blue tint) and pale gold. If the dress is blue and black, the photo is wrong.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Anonymous Coward]

I had an interesting experience with this dress thing. I read an article somewhere, and the dress shown was definitely blue and black. Later, I saw the same article on my chromebook, where I keep the brightness setting extremely low. I saw an article on the dress again, and it was white and gold. I examined the dress and areas where I know I saw blue and black previously. I looked at it, blinked at it, and I kept seeing white/gold. I thought it might be a different picture, but because of what I'd read about it, I assumed it wasn't, and that I could see it now due to the brightness level of the LCD display. I said 'wow, that is kinda freaky', and proceeded to turn up the brightness. The dress became blue/black at full brightness. That's when the real freakiness started. I figured I'd lower the brightness back down so I could examine it as white/gold, and even after I turned the brightness down to it's lowest level, I still couldn't see the white/gold anymore. It stayed blue/black, even at the original brightness level. I can't see it as white any more, even under the same conditions, and I was sure I was seeing white and gold.

Damn these quixotic eyes.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have an IPS display. I cannot see it as anything but blue and black ... believe me, I've tried. I've looked on multiple displays and multiple lighting conditions. Always blue. Always.

There is no way I can fool my mind into seeing it as white and gold. It is so *clearly* blue. The gold, I can understand .... there is a slight golden sheen to the black part of the dress. But there is no way I can understand how anyone could perceive that clear baby blue colour as white.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[gzuckier]

Not depending on which display so much, but with LCD displays, depending more on what angle you are looking at. Look at it straight on, and the dress is white and gold. Ask the person next to you, and they will tell you it is blue and black. Turn your screen towards them and the effect will be reversed.

I had it absolutely perfectly, laptop display, partially dimmed room lights, so that when you scrolled down so that only the last couple of bands on the dress were visible it was obviously black and blue, but as you scrolled up it became blue and gold. Haven't been able to reproduce the effect since, but it is possible! Don't stop trying!

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[gzuckier]

This dress thing is actually a simplified version of a really powerful and freaky illusion which unfortunately only works in a darkened room. You take a quilt with different color squares. You can verify in white light that the different colors span the rainbow. On top of this quilt, you lay a black piece of cardboard which has a cutout allowing you to only see one color patch. Say it's a greenish patch. In the darkened room with the single white light, you can confirm that this single visible patch is green. Then you put colored filters in front of the light until the patch appears to be red/orange. The light is red/orange, so the green patch now appears red/orange. Makes sense right? Then you remove the black cardboard so you can see all the color patches. And suddenly that red/orange patch appears green again. Cover it up with the black cardboard again and it'll appear red/orange. Remove the cardboard and it appears green. What's going on (and also what's going on in the dress photo) is that your brain is using the information of surrounding objects (in the dress pic, it's the background visible to the right) to gauge the amount of light and the color of the light. It then corrects for the color of the light to white balance what you see, and for the brightness to compensate for over/under exposure. So the colors and intensity your eyes see remain the same, just how your brain interprets them changes.

Edwin Land (of Polaroid fame) did a lot of research on this. The best was his demonstration that you could take a set of like 5 blocks of colors like 10 nm apart arranged in ascending or descending wavelength and get an obvious set of slightly different colors going from yellow to greenish yellow. But if you then made a matrix of like 100 blocks with each chosen randomly from one of those yellow blocks, it demonstrated the entire spectrum.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[gzuckier]

>"Not depending on which display so much, but with LCD displays, depending more on what angle you are looking at. Look at it straight on, and the dress is white and gold"

Well, in my case, when I look at the photo in any light, on any monitor, at any angle, at any time, I have and have always seen only light blue and brown/gold. There is no situation where it is either "blue and black" or "white and gold".

The question is what we see in the photo, not what the dress ACTUALLY is- we can't know that because all we are allowed to see is a [poor] PHOTO of the dress, not the actual dress. And it is obvious the camera white balance and exposure is way off, trying to compensate for something, resulting in a photo with a probably very false representation.

In my "research" (i.e. I had a lucky configuration looking at the pic) described further up the comments, the black/blue impression of the dress comes when isolating just the lower few bands of the dress, the blue/gold comes from the upper region. Note that the background light at the bottom is goldish, the background light higher up is bluish. (OK, baby Boomers all together now, "That's funny, you don't look Bluish").

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[gzuckier]

Because what we perceive as the color of some surface is really a reflection of ambient light from that surface. So color of the surface would change depending on color of the light that it is reflecting. But our brain has auto white balance image preprocessing filter that fixes surface color for us based on light color , which is computed partially using our knowledge on what color things should normally have. In this picture dress could be white if it is not in a lighten by yellow colored light behind it, but lighten by blueish light source, and camera white balance is set somewhere in a middle. Otherwise it's blue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[gzuckier]

Well, the best explanation is that our brain does very, very hefty colour correction on its own. The reason is probably so we can ignore the irrelevant information, i.e. the light colour and any sensitivity lag between the different cones and identify objects.

If you've ever tried to do colour computer vision you will be *astonished* at how good we are at it.

Anyway, my guess is that the reason for this one appearing as two different things is it's very close to some threshold. It's possible to interpret it as more or less normal colours under a blueish light (i.e, sunlight), which makes you perceive the blueish grey as white. Or, you perceive it as blue under washed out much more orange light (e.g. incandescent bulbs) in which case you perceive the blueish grey as blue. The "white/blue" colour is objectively blueish grey if you check the actual hex values: it's mostly grey but the blue channel is a bit higher, but not by that much.

Our brains seem to model the complete co varying of the colours so once you decide what the light colour is, this effects the perception of all the colours. Black is nevertruly black and always reflects some light, so once the brain has decided the blue is super washed out by excessive light and that light is orange, that makes bright orangish things perceived as black since that's how black would appear under those circumstances. Given the rather good corrections of the picture, it appears those people are correct (though I'm on the white/gold side).

These two perceptions are very, very different and so it's kind of a binary thing, either you perceive one or the other. Now, I suspect that this photo is very close to the tipping point which is why some people perceive it very differently from others.

Either way, it's a fascinating example of colour interpretation.

This one is also excellent:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/c...

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. The brain adjusts the perceived colours, just as the scientist said. My own experience: I once saw a photograph of a bowl of fruit, with a target area on the skin of a banana marked with a red rectangle. In the photo the banana skin was clearly banana-yellow. But when just that small rectangular area was displayed on a white background, it was clearly blue-green. This effect can be observed simply using a color picker tool on any digital photo with ambiguous lighting -- shadows, blue tint from the sky, etc.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[jrumney]

I've noticed this too. Many of the photos being spammed on my Facebook feed are cropped showing only the top 25% of the photo. In those photos, the light blue/gold shows up (with the light blue looking like bad white-balancing, so could easily be seen as white). But whenever the full picture is visible, the blue/black is more apparent, and when the bottom half of the dress is all that is visible, it definitely looks blue/black. Some of the people that have responded here saying they never see white/gold also stated that they have large monitors, so maybe they have never seen the image cropped, as it first appears on my relatively small laptop display on the buzzfeed site and others where I have to scroll down to see the full image.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[RespekMyAthorati]

Oh, so RGB={0,0,255} isn't "quantitatively blue", huh?
Horseshit. If there is no red, no green, and %100 blue, then the color is quantitatively blue.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[RespekMyAthorati]

Or, you could just use the eyedropper tool in photoshop, which clearly indicates that the colors are light blue and medium brown.
If these aren't the actual colors of the dress, then the picture is improperly exposed.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[stealth_finger]

That's what me and my brother thought, dependant on a number of factors. But when it was on the news we were both seeing the different colours, regardless of viewing angle or distance or any other factors. The effect was even carried through to a photo on my phone of the paused tv screen. It's the most bizarre thing.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[KozmoStevnNaut]

No, the highlights are simply blowout because the picture was taken on a phone camera. Give me a bright enough light, a piece of dark fabric and a phone camera, and I can easily make white or near-white highlights appear on a picture of said dark fabric.

Brown highlights are common on "black" fabrics, since they are often extremely dark brown (or blue), not true black. So the dark parts are definitely black.

If the blue parts of the dress were actually white, that would require a light source with a lot of blue light, as well as a camera with very misconfigured white balance. You would have to deliberately do this to mislead. It's also impossible to do this on an iPhone (which the picture was taken with).

Lastly, we know for a fact that the dress is blue and black, because the manufacturer doesn't even sell a white and gold version.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Anonymous Coward]

We used MS Paint.

Rich people simply can't imagine using anything but Photoshop, even for the most simple task.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[jpapon]

White/grey have nearly equal levels of R,G,B. This color clearly has a higher intensity in the blue channel.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[jez9999]

I see it as white and gold, every time. I just about get how the dark blue could change to light blue, and my brain perceives it as white given the dark contrast with the stripes. What I don't get is how black can turn to brown or gold or something. Surely lighter black should just be grey.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[jez9999]

I'd actually think it was the other way around - I'm less blue colorblind which is why I always see blue, regardless of surrounding context. You've got slight blue colorblindness which is why context causes you to interpret the blue as a different color.

This is probably the best explanation I've seen. I *cannot* see the dress as anything but white and gold, no matter what lighting conditions, etc. I'm not totally colourblind to blue, and when I grab some of the "white" pixels in GIMP and blow them up they look light blue; but in context they look white (maybe a "dull" white).

My mum, however, usually sees it as blue and black. She often sees things as dark blue that I would call "grey". So maybe my eyes just have fewer blue cones.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[jez9999]

But they can perceived as either blue and black or white and gold.

Can someone explain to me how a black garment could change to a gold colour instead of grey? It would virtually take a red/orange streetlight to achieve that effect.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[tehcyder]

People seeing it for the first time, on the same device, in the same room for several hours, see different colors.

Your experience is not enough to draw any conclusion from.

If you don't see it as blue and black, you are clearly some sort of alien lizard-being.

Worryingly, that means that only about a quarter of the people around me are actually human.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[tehcyder]

I'm firmly in the "the dress appears blue and brown/black but is actually white and gold" camp.

I bet you and the rest of the white/gold fascists are feeling pretty stupid now you've seen a picture of the (undeniably) blue and black dress?

I knew I was right, I just fucking knew it. Finally, a victory for humanity against the powers of darkness!

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[KozmoStevnNaut]

No, it's distinctly a grayish blue. The photo is perfectly fine showing which colors the dress is, it's just a bit overexposed so the colors doesn't show through as strongly as the official model photo on Amazon.

And shiny black often appears golden or brownish under strong direct light which is actually a really big clue. Since the "gold" parts fade way too much to black in the dark parts, it's obviously now brown/gold, but black with a strong light shining on it. And no light source can simultaneously put warm highlights on black, while at the same time casting a cool blue tint on white, especially not one as strong as in the picture. Not in this universe, at least.

Re: White balance and contrast in camera.

[KozmoStevnNaut]

But how can those factors simultaneously cause a warm highlight on black and a cool blue tint on white?

The answer is that they cannot do that.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[tehcyder]

I'd say the normal people are the one who see it white and gold...

Literally Hitler.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[tehcyder]

I am fairly convinced that those that claim the dress to be "distinctly blue" are just trolling the rest and extracting some weird sort of pleasure from it. The interesting aspect of this story is that there are sooo many people willing to troll others.

That would be a strong possibility, except for the inconvenient fact that the dress IS blue.

Us "blueys" are like Neo in The Matrix, piercing through the deliberate veils of convention to see the truth.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[tehcyder]

Stick it in a photo editor and ask it what colour it is. It's white (with a faint blue tint) and pale gold. If the dress is blue and black, the photo is wrong.

You'd better tell the manufacturers about your interesting discovery, since from their point they only sell a black and navy blue version. But what would they know?

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[tehcyder]

Surely lighter black should just be grey.

What we see as black is often very dark blue or green or brown in reality.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[tehcyder]

when you can't be sure of something "I don't know" is perfectly acceptable as an answer.

No one's asking you to stake your mother's life on it, it's just your impression of a dress colour.

If I say "that bird looks black" no one's going to arrest me if it turns out to be dark brown with some dark blue flashes and a white tail feather.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[tehcyder]

gold is not a color

Gold is just shiny yellow, like silver is shiny grey.

And irony is colour blind people getting the real colours right more than those with normal vision.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[tehcyder]

That doesn't explain why two people looking at the same photo swear they see totally different colors.

Because one is a human being, and the other is a man-shaped robot from the future posing as a human as he plots to destroy the one man who can save the human race from enslavement?

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[jrumney]

The dress is overexposed which moves the black to grey, and the blue has been desaturated, which leaves mostly yellowish hues like brown and gold behind.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Capt.Albatross]

Put it into to Photoshop and eye-dropper the colours. They are quantitatively light blue and dark brown.

But they can perceived as either blue and black or white and gold.

Thank you. I was prepared to believe that the dress was blue and black, but not that the image of it contained black (FWIW, I have always seen it as unambiguously blue/brown from the start, before I knew there was a question.)

The explanation I read (New Scientist) completely overlooked the significant issue of accuracy in color reproduction, both in the camera and in the display.
 

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Capt.Albatross]

Put it into to Photoshop and eye-dropper the colours. They are quantitatively light blue and dark brown.

But they can perceived as either blue and black or white and gold.

You're assuming proper white balance at the time the photo was shot for the lighting conditions of the environment in which the photo was shot for your "quantitatively" assertion. Unless you were there or took the photo, you cannot say with any certainty.

No, gmbrg is making a statement about the colors recorded in the image file, not about the colors of the dress. The values in the image file are precise quantities.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[hucker75]

Greyish blue and blueish white are the same thing. The photo does not show the colours at all, it's washed out, you have lost the colours. In real life, your eyes know what the surrounding light is and subtract that from the dress, so you can tell the colour. It's called "white balance" and your brain is very good at it. But we have no idea what the light source is in that room.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[hucker75]

What have the manufacturers of the dress to do with anything? It's the CAMERA that got the colours wrong, and it's common knowledge that cameras are not as good as humans at white balance.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Oh, so RGB={0,0,255} isn't "quantitatively blue", huh?
Horseshit. If there is no red, no green, and %100 blue, then the color is quantitatively blue."

actually no. ask anyone who has only blue cones... they will have no idea what blue is...
And I'm sure if you lived in a room several days that is only illuminated by blue light, your sense of blue will start to fade as well. You can only know blue if you also have yellow around (yellow is the combination of red and green).

and RGB=[0,0,255] is NOT just blue light. That only dictates GUN values for a display device. Every display device will do something different with that RGB value and nearly all will display SOME "green" and maybe even some "red" light when handed that [0,0,255].

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[neurocutie]

"Oh, so RGB={0,0,255} isn't "quantitatively blue", huh? Horseshit. If there is no red, no green, and %100 blue, then the color is quantitatively blue."

You've missed the point... the question is NOT "Give me an example of something that is liikely to be blue". Sure RGB=[0,0,255] on a standard commercial display device, viewing with a wide range of background conditions and lighting is very likely to appear blue to a normal observer.

But that is not real life and RGB only exists in the confines of a display device, not the real world where can have almost limitless levels of light energies of all different wavelengths and spectral signatures. Even in RGB space, could you reliably tell me whether a pixel in a visual scene that has values [100,100,120] will appear to be blue or bluish? NO YOU CANNOT.

The question of "is there a quantitative BLUE" is instead the question of "Is there a quantitative description of what about the physics of a visual scene (or light stimulus) that will ALWAYS appear to be BLUE, and DEFINES what blue is"... there IS NOT, certainly not a simple one, though we can come up with approximations based on physiology and psychphysics.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[torkus]

It's similar to the trick where you stare at a B&W pattern on a page then look at the wall to see the inverse of it.

Of if you wear tinted sunglasses the world looks (insert color) at first then a while later you don't notice. When you take the glasses off things look...well brighter...but the colors are a bit odd for a few minutes there too.

Or the bunch of other optical illusions where you surround a color with others and it looks different.

It's not some great big mystery for anyone who works with photography (or anything similar that deals with lighting and color). That's why monitors are calibrated to certain colors and brightness otherwise you'd never get consistency. It's why artists draw/paint/etc. under specific lighting. It's why you put makeup on in front of lit mirror with a certain color bulb. It's why home depot sells warm, natural, and cool colored lights. etc etc etc

I can't believe people are actually making a big deal about this.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Anonymous Coward]

Put it into to Photoshop and eye-dropper the colours.

Excuse me. Is GIMP good enough for that functionality?

--

On the internet nobody can hear you being subtle

Only you can decide whether GIMP is adequate for pulling RGB values from an image. That's what's so great about open source!!

Subtlety is wasted on the weak

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[mattack2]

Interesting, yours is the first time I've seen someone say specifically that the absolute same image appeared differently.

Even on TV coverage, I've seen them show "white and gold" and "black and blue" next to each other or right after each other..

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[KozmoStevnNaut]

Based on the adjectives, one is more blue, the other is more white.

The photo shows plenty of color. From looking at the picture, the background in particular, it is very clear that the image is quite over-exposed, which will significantly lighten colors. Obviously, the camera based its light metering on the black parts of the overall rather dark dress, which caused the blue parts to become overexposed and the the background to blow out.

It's completely ridiculously obvious, to the point where I theorize that anyone seeing white instead of blue actually has a mild form of brain damage.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[hucker75]

It's not obviously over exposed at all. The camera could have had spot metering and exposed the dress correctly, while overexposing the background. This is the right way to take a photo, so you see the subject properly.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Capt.Albatross]

You are entitled to your opinion, but your attempt to establish it as the sole objective point of view is doomed to failure, on account of its subjective basis.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[dAzED1]

there are no "white" pixels on your screen. There's a backlight, sure, but that's applied to the entire screen, to adjust brightness. Color saturation at extremely high levels is black. At extremely low levels, it's white. That there is blue, is immaterial - give it extreme low color saturation with even just blue, it becomes white. There is an extreme difference between seeing something in person, and seeing something on a computer monitor where two degrees of artificial filtration are occurring due to technological limitations. And for the record, I saw blue and the brown/orange color used in the old cammo. I didn't see white :P

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[Capt.Albatross]

"Oh, so RGB={0,0,255} isn't "quantitatively blue", huh?
Horseshit. If there is no red, no green, and %100 blue, then the color is quantitatively blue."

actually no. ask anyone who has only blue cones... they will have no idea what blue is...

So if a tree falls in a forest, and someone, somewhere is deaf, then it doesn't make a sound?

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[KozmoStevnNaut]

And yet the dress is definitely over-exposed when we compare with model pictures of the very same dress from Amazon etc.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[hucker75]

Maybe so, but that wasn't obvious from looking at the photo. To me the background was too bright, an indication that the camera has metered on the dress and left the background to get too bright.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[KozmoStevnNaut]

To me it looks like it metered almost exclusively on a black part of the dress, blowing out both the background and the blue bits of the dress.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[hucker75]

Cameras don't meter on a very small spot like that. Usually it's the centre 9th (one third width, one third height) of the whole photo. Either that or it takes account of the whole photo in a clever way.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[KozmoStevnNaut]

The centre 9th of the photo in question is quite dark, too.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[hucker75]

No, the centre 9th of the photo contains only dress, and both colours of it. So I'd expect it to balance this correctly. If I take a photo of a dark object in a brightly lit room like that, I either get the object looking correct, or too DARK because the camera is trying to get the bright room to look right. I can only surmise that the photographer used an Iphone or some such crap. I've never seen a camera make such an arse of a photo.

Re:White balance and contrast in camera.

[KozmoStevnNaut]

The picture was indeed taken with an iPhone :-)

We can definitely agree on the crappiness of the picture.

Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn

[Anonymous Coward]

/thread

Re:Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn

[serviscope_minor]

Then please hand in your nerd card on the way out along with the idiots who marked this "insightful".

How the brain perceives colour well is fascinating, and our subconscious is amazingly good at it. The "gold" colour is objectively gold (check in the GIMP), and yet some people's brains manage to correctly interpret it as black.

If you're not interested in that and the underlying algorithms behind how our brain works, then frankly I wonder what the hell you're doing here.

Or possibly you just think you're too cool to be interested in popular stuff, in which case, grow up.

Re:Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn

[Anonymous Coward]

It's just a real-life variant of this illusion, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checker_shadow_illusion, but so many people out there are going on about this like it's a brand new phenomena and they want to feel special they learnt something new.

I have seen both color pairs

[Anonymous Coward]

First time I saw it was White( or Light Blue) and Gold. This was during the day. That night I took another look and the dress was Dark Blue and Black.

Not a unique photo

[Teun]

The GF is regularly checking out the Dutch version of Ebay (Marktplaats) for clothing and these kind of problems are usually caused by poor quality phone camera's.

Re:Not a unique photo

[Coisiche]

This is slashdot; how are we supposed to know what GF stands for?

Re:Not a unique photo

[worf_mo]

Goldfish, d'oh!

Re:Not a unique photo

[serviscope_minor]

The photo may not be unique but it is interesting in that it seems very close to some threshold in the brain such that the population is more or less split into two very, very different interpretations. That is interesting.

Re:Not a unique photo

[Anonymous Coward]

It stands for Grandfather, either in the literal sense, or as slang for a gang leader.

Re: Typical nerd

[Anonymous Coward]

Worse, it isn't even being occupied by a pretty girl

What a complete waste of time...

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously? Who gives a flying fuck??

XKCD shows you

[gbjbaanb]

http://xkcd.com/1492/

It is blue and black, but if you up the lighting, and/or display it against a white background the black lace part looks golden.

Some programmes on TV over here (including the excellent Last Leg - see it on C4 player) had it on the show, it really is blue and black.

Re:XKCD shows you

[Sesostris III]

The BBC also show the actual dress:

Optical illusion: Dress colour debate goes global

I see white and gold, although the actual dress is blue and black.

Re:XKCD shows you

[Anonymous Coward]

The colors shown in the photograph ARE (blueish) white and gold. Unlike the kxcd-dresses, where the colour are actually identical, you can take a sample from the white and gold and compare them to the photograph on the right and see they are different.

Re:XKCD shows you

[cascadingstylesheet]

The photo at BBC does look blue and black. The photo at PBS looks white and gold.

Re:XKCD shows you

[Anonymous Coward]

If the picture in that article is the ACTUAL dress, whoever took that picture needs to, first off, throw the camera away, and second, get their eyes checked because the picture they took in no way shape or form even looks close to the real dress and they should have been able to see that.

Re:XKCD shows you

[Anonymous Coward]

No it doesn't. Both are very clearly purplish blue and brownish black.

Back-end image file manipulation?

[swb]

I'd swear I saw completely different images of these dresses posted, at extremes of the color controversy and neither was at all ambigous as to what color it was.

I wonder what the likelihood is that two or more images were served to clients, either at random or by some algorithm, to further the controversy? I can see one single ambiguous image that could go either way, but most of the examples I saw looked to be tweaked for maximum color association.

If you served tweaked images to clients so that "everyone" saw a different image, including people who saw different images at different times muddying their memory of what they saw over time, you could really amplify the controversy since people would actually be seeing a different image.

Re:Back-end image file manipulation?

[werepants]

Of course you could, but what's more likely - some elaborate scheme to create a viral controversy that's tied to no obvious material benefit, or a picture that just happened to be taken with a shitty cellphone that gets interpreted differently by different viewers? What's more, lots of people looking at exactly the same image, at the same time, on the same device (for instance, my wife and I) came to opposite conclusions.

The summary and linked xkcd comic do a completely accurate job explaining the phenomena, no conspiracy theories required.

Re:Back-end image file manipulation?

[jason-999-]

That's what I originally wondered, so I downloaded the image. I can see it as white/gold, close/cover my eyes so it's dark, then look and it'll be black/blue.

Re:Back-end image file manipulation?

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course you could, but what's more likely - some elaborate scheme to create a viral controversy that's tied to no obvious material benefit,

You are now aware that world powers are performing such social experiments to better hone their propaganda machines and "combat extremism", etc. No, seriously, they are.

Not saying that is what's going on, just that shit like this actually happens. I've seen papers on weaponizing irony, for fuck's sake.

Re:Back-end image file manipulation?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm...

The first time I saw it, I could not see how anyone would see anything but white and gold (or, more precisely, white with some bluish cast, and gold). I thought the black-blue thing was some massive joke or troll being played by 25% of the internet.

Then, I read someplace else, in a different window, about tilting the screen. So I did. And it looked blue and black. The thing is, when I tilted the screen back, it looked blue and black still. Even now when I go to look at the photo, it registers as blue and black perceptually, even though I know it's really more like light blue and brown/gold, and I remember when I couldn't see anything but white and gold.

My point is that I've seen it both ways, on the same exact photo on the same webpage, without reloading the page, simply by tilting my laptop. I honestly wondered the same thing as you--it would be easy to load different images at different times--but after I saw it differently, I understood what was happening.

To me, it's a fascinating phenomenon, and a brilliant example of how the properties of a stimulus can be perceived in completely different ways depending on how information is processed. I'm very happy I was able to experience the change, too--if I hadn't, I don't think I would have understood it personally. It's sort of like those 3d magic eye things, but with color rather than depth perception.

Re:Back-end image file manipulation?

[swb]

Yes, I realize that the sort of Occam's Razor kind of explanation is that it is a result of a bad picture that exposes some kind of color processing ambiguity and not a result of some kind of manipulation.

That being said, I think it's not unrealistic at all in era of clickbaiting and relentless social media trolling that someone would want to experiment with a scheme for manipulating social media memes or figuring out a way to amplify their views. As far as I know, money can still be made on web advertising, drive-by downloads, tracking, etc.

And as the AC poster who also replied said, there ARE organizations with a vested interest in manipulating socal media, whether its "merely" for advertising purposes or for more nefarious reasons.

Color means many things

[ganv]

This reminds me of the great entries from the competitaion to explain 'What is Color':

https://vimeo.com/87968614 http://www.centerforcommunicat...

By the way, I see white/lavender and brown. It would be very interesting to know what lighting/image manipulation was done to get those colors out of a dark blue and black dress.

Re:Color means many things

[BarbaraHudson]

Load it in the gimp, increase the brightness (a lot) and the contrast (again, a lot). Without that, the color picker says blue and brown/grey. What color is the dress? Who knows. What color is the dress as shown in the picture? Blue/brown/grey.

That being said, if you look at the one place in the picture that doesn't appear to suffer as much from color imbalance / over-exposure (the item of clothing hanging on the back of the chair, on the left side at about waist height), It's a cow pattern print.

Re:Color means many things

[karnal]

That's my thinking exactly. Who gives a shit what the color of the dress actually is; it's obvious from the image displayed that you're not really going to "see" the correct colors anyways.

Re:Color means many things

[werepants]

The GIMP doesn't really mean anything, because what's at play here is our mental perception of color. White snow in the shade has a distinct blue tone if you look at it in a photo editor, but that doesn't mean that it is blue. Really, we've got that exact phenomena going on here - the colors could be adequately described two different ways, white and gold dress in the shade (blue-ish light) or blue and black dress in incandescent light (gold-ish). It's really a matter of interpretation.

For another great example of just how confounding this effect can be: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

Re:Color means many things

[BarbaraHudson]

I was not posting about the color of the real / original dress, and I made that clear. The color of the pixels in the picture is something that is easy to determine. They are blue/dark grey. That people might perceive them as something else doesn't take away from the color value of each individual pixel.

If snow looks a little blue son-screen, you should try adjusting the color temperature of your screen.

Re:Color means many things

[Anonymous Coward]

The PICTURE of the dress is in fact a very pale blue color, with a brown/dark gold color.
The PICTURE itself (at least on CNN) is not blue/black.
Pull up the image in GIMP to check the RGB values and this will be clear.

The dress is a dark black and solid royal blue.
Of course a washed out photo looks nothing like the actual item.

I still can not find a picture of the dress that is strongly blue and black.
Screen displays of the picture with weird polarization could cause a strong shift in the appearance of the picture.

The correct answer to the question 'What color is this dress?' from the picture is: I have no idea. I can tell you what color the picture is though.

Re:Color means many things

[werepants]

I use a color sensor to calibrate my screen for any production work, which I do occasionally (although not as much as I once did) as a professional photographer. Our brains lie to us, and the "actual" color displayed on screen is next to meaningless. That's what this whole illusion is about - regardless of the color on the screen, we can interpret it to be dramatically different "real" colors, based an the assumptions we make subconsciously about the context of the image.

By the way, I can see it both ways. Just look at it and imagine the dress is in a shaded alcove with incandescent lighting. Then, imagine that it is a shiny dress with bright yellow light on it. All I have to do is tell myself one or the other of these scenarios and I can see it blue/black or black/gold.

Really, the whole point here is that efforts to "analyze" this with photo editors misses the point - this is an optical illusion borne out of artifacts in human vision processing. It isn't a physics or technology problem.

Re:Color means many things

[werepants]

The PICTURE of the dress is in fact a very pale blue color, with a brown/dark gold color.
The PICTURE itself (at least on CNN) is not blue/black.

The point is, this doesn't help us solve the problem. Because very pale blue color (on the monitor) could be gotten by capturing an image of white in the shade, or washed out dark blue. Or lots of other more obscure and less likely ways.

Trying to "analyze" this with photo editors misses the point - this is an optical illusion borne out of artifacts in human vision processing. It isn't a physics or technology problem.

Re: Typical nerd

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you saying it was being worn by a shemale? A tranny? A chick-with-a-dick? A ladyboy? A he-she? A shim? A vagcock? A twig-n-taco? A slitcock? A systemd?

Changed for me

[skirmish666]

The first time I saw the picture I could swear it was white / gold. I could see a slight blue hue to the white part but it was more or less white with gold.

After I read another article and saw the dress in a catalogue I read the first article again and it appeared blue / black. I couldn't believe it appeared so differently and had to check I was reading the same article with the same photo again.

Re:Changed for me

[drinkypoo]

Is it in fact the same photo again? Or was it messed with again?

Re:Changed for me

[Anonymous Coward]

Images have been changing, it's not you.

Re:Changed for me

[EvilSS]

The first time I saw the picture I could swear it was white / gold. I could see a slight blue hue to the white part but it was more or less white with gold.

After I read another article and saw the dress in a catalogue I read the first article again and it appeared blue / black. I couldn't believe it appeared so differently and had to check I was reading the same article with the same photo again.

I had the same experience. Kind of jarring isn't it? I had even saved a copy of the image when I first saw it (to play with in photoshop) and checked that to be sure someone wasn't messing with me and everyone else and swapping out the image.

We as a species always seem to be of the "believe it when I see it" persuasion but something like this happens and it is a pretty in-your-face example of just how much our own brains manipulate our sensory input before presenting it to us a reality.

Perception

[Dan East]

First off, the picture is crap. It's overexposed and the white balance is off by a mile. My 10 year old Razr flip phone took better pictures than that.

However, there's still a human perception factor going on. I had looked at the picture on my laptop, and it was clearly white and gold. Then later I pulled the exact same picture up on my iPhone to show it to someone, and it looked black and blue. I then concluded that the picture looked different on my laptop than my phone due to differences in the display. When I got back home I pulled the picture up on both my phone and laptop to do a direct comparison, and both, including on my phone, looked white and gold again.

So I think it depends on whether your eyes are currently adapted to dim indoor lighting or bright outdoor lighting, in addition to the backlight on your device also changing the hue depending on if it's automatically full bright for outdoors or dim for indoors.

Re:Perception

[qubezz]

I think that understanding photography and exposure is the key to recognizing the color in the picture - if you are familiar with photography, you can see that the background is light and almost blown out, and can use that as a reference for how the entire photo was lit when it was taken. However, if your brain doesn't process the context of the photo, and you evaluate it based on the blue background of a web site or a dark room around you, maybe you have the optical illusion that it is white. I can not unsee it as blue because I recognize the photo's lighting.

Re:Perception

[itzly]

However, if your brain doesn't process the context of the photo

I did notice the overexposed background, and I interpreted as a picture taken of a white/gold dress in the shade against a sunny background with a blue sky.

Re:Perception

[Anonymous Coward]

I has nothing to do with adaptation to brightness, but adaptation to color. It depends on wether you indoor lighting is more incandescent-style (~2700K) or daylight (6500K), or if you go outside during sunset/sunrise or midday (the latter should be 6500k again). The colors of the objects that surround also taint your perception. There's a number of excellent demos here.

Re:Perception

[Kjella]

As such it's not the brightness, it's the color temperature. The spectrum of light ranges in color temperature from 1850K at sunrise/sunset to 6500K on an overcast day to 15000K under a clear blue sky. The eyes adjust to this, if you look at someone using a cell phone at night it'll probably seem to have an eerie blue glow as it has daylight color temperature. So with "nightvision" the dress looks blue/black, with "dayvision" it looks white/gold.

The people trying to read the RGB values to determine the "truth" forget that the color space assumes you have a D65 white point. Basically your LCD screen is trying to show you correct colors for overcast daylight. If you stare at the red sunrise/sunset or the blue sky for a while and then look at the LCD screen, your color perception will be off. Apparently this picture is in just the right sweet spot to confuse a lot of people.

Re:Perception

[Anonymous Coward]

why white and gold, blue and black? Actually, in RGB color codes, white is (255,255,255),which means (red,green,blue),so as gold(255,215,0),blue(0,0,255)and black (0,0,0), convert white to blue just needs to cancel same degree red and green, convert gold to black cancel red and green as well , so in dark light, all color blinds could see black and blue because red and green is 0 for them.

Re:Perception

[zoffdino]

I'm a graphic designer and photography enthusiast. I'm typing this on a NEC PA242W color-calibrated monitor, in a near-dark room. That dress is white and gold. the white part has a blue tint but I wouldn't call it blue. The colors look the same on my iPhone 5S. When I bring the iPhone outside, the blue tinge is more apparent (a short of light sky-blue) and the gold/brown turn darker, somewhat into the black category.

The different isn't in the screens, it's in your eyes, caused by environmental light. A sunny day at noon can be 100x brighter than even a well-lit room with floor-to-ceiling windows. If it's sunny in your location right now, try this: find a view point where you can frame both the sky and a patch of dirt land (no grass or foliage). Put the camera in manual mode, pick a shutter speed, manual daylight white-balance (6500K) and a low ISO, start with a large aperture (like f/4) and gradually step it down (like f/22). The sky will appear more blue and the ground will appear darker.

That's exactly what our eyes do. In darker places, the pupils open up to accept more lights, the highlights (blueish-white) gets push up to white but mid-tones and shadows are preserved. In bright places, the opposite happen: lower mid-tones and shadows are pushed to near-black, highlights are pulled down to reveal the blue accent.

Re:Perception

[Kartu]

Could you please elaborate, as I'm trying hard to imagine how on earth can that look "blue and black" as actually HIDING the context I clearly see gold color.

PS
I'm talking about this image:
http://img.washingtonpost.com/...

Re:Perception

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't say you know photography when you can't even see that the dress is clearly not illuminated by the same light that illuminates the background. The dress is orders of magnitude darker than the background. At the same time it's both closer to the camera than the background (obviously) and it's closer to the light that illuminates the dress (see the specular reflections on the draped shoulder bits). If that light were the dominant light on the background, the background would be much darker than the dress instead of the other way around.

Re:Perception

[Lunix Nutcase]

That dress is white and gold. the white part has a blue tint but I wouldn't call it blue.

No, it's not. The original picture is overexposed and washes out the colors as shown in the picture I linked which contains a second picture showing the actual colors.

Re:Perception

[Lunix Nutcase]

It looks "blue and black" because that's what it is.

Re:Perception

[denzacar]

That's not how it would work. It's cloth. It has ripples and shades.
There would be patterned ripples across the dress where "real" colors would show in shades or highlights.

IF the photo itself wasn't messed up by the camera/software, effectively replacing the color palette in the entire photo.

William Gibson foresaw this in his "Bigend cycle" books.
Hubertus Bigend wears International Klein Blue suits just to fuck with everyone else, as it can't be represented correctly on monitors or in print - note two different whites in the color corrected photo in order to get both the skin tones and the dress right.

Gibson just didn't thought of adding shitty CCDs to the list of technology with issues with reproduction of the color.
Or, illiterate "designers".
She calls it "Royal Blue" in the video.

Sure... If one could get people to wear a computer screen, calibrated to show the web palette of colors.
There will be little difference. THERE. On the screen.
Especially if one's screen is not even close to calibrated.

On the other hand.... Trying to mix those "equivalent" values listed in RGB and CMYK.
In Web-RGB they WILL look exactly the same. And so will the blacks.
http://i.imgur.com/QdL00rr.jpg

Ask the same industry standard company to do it using their other, more professional tool, with full RGB and CMYK gamut...
http://i.imgur.com/46B6H55.jpg

And just try using the RGB and CMYK values for Ultramarine (essentially IKB).
http://i.imgur.com/Idc2pr7.jpg

The color she envisioned on her screen is NOT the color of cloth chosen for the dress, based on the color on the screen.
She wanted "royal blue" but picked ultramarine - because Web-RGB royal blue is closer to aquamarine IRL.
The person designing the dress DOES NOT KNOW WHAT COLOR IT IS.

It's not about "rods and cones" and "everyone seeing colors a little differently".
It's about people using wrong names for colors, often calling many different colors by the same name and the same color by different names.
Then it is about faulty capture technology and badly written color conversion and calibration algorithms.
Then it is about faulty display technology, which can't show the same image under different viewing angles.
THEN, and only then, MAYBE, color perception and ambient lighting might fool the untrained eye.

But it is most likely that in most cases it is again different people calling a shade of red pink and orange.
While trying to GUESS the "correct" color from a crappy photo on a crappy screen.

Re:Perception

[werepants]

It isn't about the camera's white balance. It is about the light on the dress, and the lack of sufficient context to determine exactly which light the dress is in. Is the dress in the shade, with a blown out background from a different light source? Or is the dress in the same blown out golden light as the background? The brain can choose one way or the other - if it prefers to think the dress is in the shade, you see white and gold. If your brain thinks it is washed out by the yellow-ish light, you see black and blue.

If you REALLY understand photography, you are well acquainted with the fact that outdoor light (shade especially) is dramatically more blue than incandescent light. If you've got both in the same scene, you get problems like this, and there's no good choice for the camera to make. This is why there are things like gels for flashes, because it isn't a problem with the way the photons are processed by the camera, it's the fact that physics delivers very different photon wavelengths from on object depending on the incident light source.

Re:Perception

[zoffdino]

I forgot to quantify it "the dress as shown in the picture". I know the actual dress is blue and black, but the crappy camera work was what generated so much controversy.

Re:Perception

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not what blue and black either. If the dress was lit by the light of the sun at a distance of 1 mile but you were somehow in front of it with eyes adjusted to overcast daylight in moderate latitudes, you'd see it as pretty fucking white. There's also no really "black" dye.

Re:Perception

[Anonymous Coward]

Who was that artist who painted pictures of pipes and then wrote: This is Not a Pipe.

That is what is going on here.
The picture is White and Gold/Brown. Check out the RGB values in GIMP or Photoshop.
It can appear blue and black under the right condition.

The Dress is blue and black but the dress is not the picture and vice versa.

You can't correctly determine the color of a dress from a bad photograph.

Re:Perception

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't what it is. The image is not the dress. Last picture I took that included the moon made i look pretty white. Do you think moon rocks are "pure white" in any meaningful way?

Re:Perception

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, correction, meant: Pale Blue and Gold/Brown. It's not White white.
The picture is one thing, the dress another. Their colors are different.

Re:Perception

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. I think people that see it as blue and black have an issue where their brain is correcting for reflection. What they are seeing is not what the physical picture is actually showing.

It's common with semi-reflective material (nylon, silk, satin, and such) that when in bright light it will reflect a different color than the actual color of the fibers. Shiny/glossy cloth like this dress is a prime example. In bright sunlight at the right angle it will take on the brown/gold type appearance as this photo shows. This is a physical effect and the the brown/gold color shown in this photo is the real true reflected color. If you don't see that then your brain is doing a color correction based on past experience with reflective materials and you are not seeing the real reflected color (poor you, you're missing out on the world).

Re:Perception

[Anonymous Coward]

That's frightening you can't tell and you have so much knowledge. It's like you learned all the skills how to play basketball at a professional level, but are born 3 feet tall.

Re:Perception

[BlackPignouf]

Thank you. GP is just a guy with a camera who thinks he understands it all just because he was lucky to process the dress as black and blue.
I've also seen enough pixels in my youth to think that I got it right : unfortunately, there's just not enough context, and I cannot see any other color than white and gold.

Re:Perception

[Anonymous Coward]

My assumption was like yours, assuming that the dress was under different light levels than the background. To me, the greatest tell-tale sign was the patch of gold-brown left at the top when the color shifted to black. Gold can appear black when adjusted, but black doesn't appear gold.

But on viewing on a better monitor, I see another possibility: If the fabric was really cheap and therefore reflecting the interior lighting, then the gold color could be coming from it reflecting the yellow lights.

Re:Perception

[Anonymous Coward]

Its not dependent on the environment, i can be out in a the bright sunlight with snow on the ground and it is the same blue and black to me as it is in a dark room.

my eyes see the white wash over the entire image, and the blown out colors in the background and remove it. leaving a blue and black dress. i can see how some people see white and gold, but i certainly don't.

Re:Perception

[Anonymous Coward]

THE PIXELS ARE BLUE

Re:Perception

[ScentCone]

He's not talking about the ACTUAL dress, he's talking about the photographic portrayal of a dress is the crappily exposed and presented JPG that everyone is looking at. The dress, as recorded in the JPG, is a barely-blue-tinted light grey, and the black elements have a demonstrably uneven RGB that makes them look gold (because that data represents a color low on blue ... which is to say, it's a golden hue).

Re:Perception

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy baloney batman - white cannot and does not have a 'tint'. If it's tinted it's not white, and in this particular case, it's blue.

End of story.

Re:Perception

[jez9999]

Those two colours are "slightly off-white blue" and "gold".

Re:Perception

[Anonymous Coward]

The RGB values don't lie. R: 122, G: 95, B: 66. Don't 'listen' to your eyes. Trust the numbers. That colour is no where near black.

http://i.imgur.com/WmOCtr1.jpg

I see multiple sets of color

[Anonymous Coward]

Up round the shoulders it is White with gold/bronze lace. At the bottom it appears blue with black lace. Lastly the middle comes off orange with bronze lace. But you have to take smaller slices to see it.

Over all the desk comes off at being light blue with bronze lace. Designer said it was blue and black.

So why... as the articals say it is your prespection of bright/light ro dark/shadow. It appears to me the dress was in partial shadow with bright background. So your brain is trying to filter the colors and get the right match. It seams the human brains are better in bright light to determine color. It is the shadow the brain is trying to "correct" the intruption.

The other note, the desugn was noted to have said "It was not a marketing ploy... they came to work this happened. Sales are up 300/week from 100/week before the picture."

Stupid post

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought it was Slashdot, Stuff that matters.....this subject doesn't freakin matter yet it gets posted...why come to Slashdot when I get this news on FOX.....I see Slashdot going back to mainstream...sad day

So we figured out different people see differently....WHOAAAAA wow....amazing.....next thing you know we figure out different people think differently....could it be...NO WAY!!!

Re:Stupid post

[Lunix Nutcase]

Nope Slashdot is now Digg 3.0.

Re:Stupid post

[dcollins117]

If it makes you feel any better about this issue appearing on a tech site, it's part of what makes computer vision hard. Colors change under different lighting conditions so how an algorithm treats color information when identifying an object or analyzing a scene is an interesting problem.

Re:Stupid post

[serviscope_minor]

God, this, 1000 times this. This is a deeply fascinating topic (yes I am a computer vision person), and it's sad to see so many people crowing about how uninteresting it is because it's popular outside of nerd circles.

different from Cornsweet

[e**(i pi)-1]

There is big difference between the Tom Cornsweet illusion which is also addressed in the XKCD http://xkcd.com/1492 Also this explanation https://www.youtube.com/watch?... While both are well done, they miss an important point. The Cornsweet paradox works for everybody. Universally. The dress paradox not. For most people (75 percent in one poll), the paradox does not work. (I myself find it hard to believe that some see initially a blue dress). But it seems that different brains work differently. This is why the phenomenon must be interesting for psychologists.

Re:different from Cornsweet

[narcc]

I'm convinced that this is just a joke that I've missed. I've tried good displays, crappy displays, various lighting, brightness settings, backgrounds, room lighting, viewing angles and probably something I've forgot. I can not get that dress to look white and gold.

It reminds me of "The emperors new cloths".

Re:different from Cornsweet

[itzly]

I have exactly the same, except I can not get it to look blue/black.

Re:different from Cornsweet

[Anonymous Coward]

I see it as Slightly Blue and Gold, and a kind of shitty picture. After looking at the 'real' pics, I now realize that I was wrong. It is in fact a VERY shitty picture.

I was curious and so I popped it into mspaint and looked at the RGB values for the various pixels.
Original pic:
The 'white/blue' regions have definitely have higher B values than R or G. The 'gold/black' regions similarly correspond to a brown (higher R+G) when under the microscope.
The second pic:
Pic as provided by the BBC and others shows wildly different RGB values. The formerly 'gold/black' regions now lack any particular channel dominance; all the pixels I looked at were an even R-G-B balance, and all about 30/255.

Re:different from Cornsweet

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe the two of you are looking at two different pictures?
The dress is not the picture. Perhaps the pictures have been modified in various digital transfers?

Unless you are both staring at the same picture, or exchange pictures you will never know.

Re:different from Cornsweet

[narcc]

I considered that as well, and pulled down the picture from multiple sources.

Re:different from Cornsweet

[narcc]

Ah, so you're in on the conspiracy!

Re:different from Cornsweet

[BlackPignouf]

I'm in that camp too. But :
I tried to put an incandescent light bulb close to my screen, took 3 steps back and squinted a little.
The dress still doesn't look clearly blue/black to me, but the blueish tone is now much more saturated and dark, and the gold is dark enough that it could be black with some orange highlights.
The effect is gone when I walk back to the screen, but at least I can understand that it can look blue/black to some people (=morons). :)

neither

[ihtoit]

it's sky blue and muddy brown.

See, I went with the definitive and used a CALIBRATED COLOUR PICKER.

Re:neither

[Anonymous Coward]

You have a generous vision of the "sky". "Sky blue" almost always refers to a light but bright blue. The Blues in the dress are desaturated. Specifically, something like 40% or 35% S for HSV. But definitely nothing I would call sky blue.

Re:neither

[ihtoit]

then you're fucking colour blind or your screen isn't properly calibrated.

Re:neither

[Anonymous Coward]

Or perhaps he looked at the RGB values in the image?

Can someone please answer

[krkhan]

Why is this particular image such a viral hit? Have people tried creating images which would appear of different colors but failed to split opinion on such a wide scale?

[Rant]
First everyone started arguing over their gut-reaction, "it's obviously color X!"

Then everyone started trying to sound smart by doing some variation of: "Colors are perceived by your brain! Can you imagine that? Your brain. Like, literally!"

The /. crowd can mostly understand without much fuss that colors are subjective. A more geek-oriented analysis -- which I'm pining to read somewhere -- would deal with what took the Internet so long to catch up to this phenomenon.
[/Rant]

Re:Can someone please answer

[JaredOfEuropa]

The real question is: was the girl who posted this image able to capitalize on its viral popularity, like the owner of Grumpy Cat?

Re:Can someone please answer

[serviscope_minor]

What's wrong with that?

It's made people realise and think about that our brain is what interprets what colours mean and in deeply non-trivial ways. It's certainly only for a short time in many cases but it's got people thinking about things they'd not normally think about.

I can't see anything wrong with that. I'm a computer vision person, so until today colour interpretation has been an esoteric topic that no one really cares about. Today I can actually talk to non-experts on a topic find interesting, and one that they temporarily find interesting too.

I like this.

Re:Can someone please answer

[smooth wombat]

I said elsewhere that this is a scam for the following reasons.

Her Tumbler account (Swiked) shows the initial photo asking what color is the dress. A day or so later she posts a second picture of someone wearing the blue/black version, stating:

this is the dress as i saw it on the day of the wedding. blue and black. It's just that one photo bUT it's so weird???!??

Here's the thing, she does not say the second photo is the same dress ON THE DAY of the wedding, only that the photo shows what she saw.

What most likely happened was she took the first picture on a different day and because it's white/gold, it took on the cast of the lighting to give a blue hue and her friends had a disagreement over the color which started the whole thing, especially if someone is red/green colorblind.

Second, if you look at the top edge of the dress in the first picture you can clearly see what would be considered "virgin" light, i.e. light which is not reflected but directly falling on to the dress. If the claim is that our eyes are fooling us because of the bright background or because we can't be sure what the lighting situation is, this light should produce a different color under it, just as light shining across a rippled surface can produce different colors.

Except it doesn't. There is no transition from the slice of light to the shaded portion. It's one continuous tone. In fact, as the picture shows, there are multiple shadows of different angles and lighting conditions which should produce different colors, but they don't. For instance, under the cape/shawl toward the upper right, the area under the shadow is darker but not a different color.

Further, if our eyes are being deceived by the bright background, covering up all but a small portion of the dress should reveal the true colors because then there would be nothing to confuse us. Except that doesn't work either, the dress stays as white/gold with a blue hue.

And finally, if you look at the edging in the middle of the picture then down to the lower left corner (our left), you can see shadows under the gold edging. If the dress in the picture was blue/black you would not see such distinct shadows as are shown in the picture.

So, the dress in the original picture IS NOT the same dress she shows a day or so later but is the same style.

One final thought. The opposite of blue on the color wheel is gold and the opposite of black is white. However, if you look at what is blue and black in the "good" picture, they are not the correct parts. The bodice is blue which means in the reversed portion the bodice of the original picture should be gold and the edging should be white. Except that is not what is shown. The bodice is white and the edging is gold.

And for the record, I am not red/green colorblind. I pass all the Ishihara color tests without issue.

Re:Can someone please answer

[serviscope_minor]

I said elsewhere that this is a scam for the following reasons.

Except a good chunk of slashdot, absolutewrite and a few other also completely unrelated forums and IRC channels are in on the "scam" and have a bunch of people who have joined the conspiracy to pretend it's blue and black. Or white and gold, in which case I'm in on the scam and hereby declare I got my note from a shady black vehicle with blacked out windows this morning at precisely 5:50am at the dedicated drop point.

It's not a scam, because it frankly doesn't matter what the original colour of the dress is.

The interesting thing is it's sufficiently close to some average threshold of human perception that nearly half the population perceive it as completely different from the other slightly-more-than half.

At that point it wouldn't actually matter if it was a 'shopped image of a dress covered in purple unicorns.

Re:Can someone please answer

[tehcyder]

You sound like one of the Reddit geniuses who identified the wrong Boston bomber.

Oh my god....

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody cares!

It's neither

[krkhan]

The image is actually a PNG with some lines criss-crossed over a zero alpha-channel, everyone just has different crappy wallpapers.

Re:It's neither

[Anonymous Coward]

+1 That's what I've been thinking the whole time. It looks blue and gold.

TED Talk by Bray Lotto

[Mike Morgan]

http://www.ted.com/talks/beau_...

It's a distraction from a real story

[Anonymous Coward]

Whenever a talking point like this hits every mainstream media outlet at the same time, now apparently Slashdot too, then I find myself wondering what poltical blunders are they trying to distract us from right now?

Re:It's a distraction from a real story

[Anonymous Coward]

The rethuglicans trying to overturn Net neutrality for their corporate bosses.

Re:It's a distraction from a real story

[Anonymous Coward]

It are probably not the blunders 'they' are trying to distract us from. I rather think it is the human nature of being ignorant to all the depressing truths around us. A built in mechanism to protect ourselves from depression. It are the people who want to distract themselves from political blunders, hence why the most shallow media sources are the most popular. Fortunately there are sites like Slashdot for people who ... oh wait...

Re:It's a distraction from a real story

[Anonymous Coward]

Recent backpage news:

* FCC still hasn't released the rules they voted on after voting on it.
* Missouri auditor who was auditing several cities' finances calls newspapers to announce a press release then "apparently" commits "suicide" before the press release.
* More craters appearing in Siberia
* IRS email investigation now thinks that a crime did occur
* Homeland security shutting down
* Terrorist threats at a mall
* Funding passed to prevent homeland security shutting down
* DC mayor allows pot

A little something for everyone. I'm sure I'm missing a ton of stuff (did Snowden say anything the last couple of days?)

Re:It's a distraction from a real story

[Anonymous Coward]

* Secret domestic torture facility being used to illegally detain, beat and even kill US citizens uncovered in Chicago by whistleblower (theguardian)

Re:It's a distraction from a real story

[tehcyder]

Whenever a talking point like this hits every mainstream media outlet at the same time, now apparently Slashdot too, then I find myself wondering what poltical blunders are they trying to distract us from right now?

Yes, I too am utterly unable to think about more than one thing a day. There have been times when I followed a cute kitty link to other cute kitties literally did no work for a week, and once a particularly amusing Chuck Norris meme caused me to miss the entire Arab Spring.

I can see both now

[Anonymous Coward]

If you see the white/gold image, scroll down the page below the image, squint, and slowly scroll up from the bottom. You will see the blue/black.

Welp.

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot is now on par with fark, reddit, twitter and facebook.

That's a shame. Just yet another social media circlejerk site.
And with the terrible layout... The worst one.

The white is not blue

[gweihir]

That is an effect from the picture sensors and optical brighteners (which give white a blue/violet tinge from converting UV to visible). However I am completely mystified as to where anybody sees black. The small horizontal stripes?

Re:The white is not blue

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone started asking explicitly if it's "white and gold" or "blue and black". Given those choices, people pick "blue and something darkish"...

Re:The white is not blue

[serviscope_minor]

I think they perceive the picture to be under intense orange light, like incandescend bulbs. This will wash the blue out to grey and make the black (which always appears as dark grey) a dar orange (i.e. gold) instead. Once your perception of one colour is fixed, the others will follow, or rather, they go as a group basically based on what you perceive the light colour as.

That said no matter how hard I try, it still looks white and gold.

Re:The white is not blue

[gweihir]

Sounds reasonable. But the gold is just to bright to be black in any light. At most its is a 50% or so gray.

The interesting thing is however the reminder that different people may see colors differently.

white (with *maybe* teeny blue tinge) and gold

[cascadingstylesheet]

Not seeing where black comes into it. Don't see any black at all.

I looked at the PBS story version.

Re:white (with *maybe* teeny blue tinge) and gold

[Anonymous Coward]

The black is the gold stripes.
When you see the blue, the black tends to have a touch of gold/brown, but it's actually black.

I was looking at this

[MrKaos]

and then I realized I just don't care.

Re:I was looking at this

[serviscope_minor]

and then I realized I just don't care.

Huh, how brains work isn't interesting! Who knew? BTW: the title of the site is "news for nerds ... " and this certainly qualifies. Just because it's popular doesn't make convincing yourself that you're indifferent any cooler.

And yes it is interesting. If you've ever tried to write code to interpret colours correctly andautomatically, you will be in awe of how good we are at it. Anything that sheds light (pun intended) on such a fascinating process is interesting.

Re:I was looking at this

[MrKaos]

Huh, how brains work isn't interesting! Just because it's popular doesn't make convincing yourself that you're indifferent any cooler.

I suppose you are right and I don't mean it that way. The stuff about the brain interpreting colours is interesting but I find that when hollywood gets involved in geek stuff they make it lame and uninteresting.

Re:I was looking at this

[tehcyder]

I can only apologise on behalf of the New World Order government which recently passed the law requiring you to view and comment on this thread on pain of up to ten years imprisonment or an amusingly heavy fine.

sigh

[s.t.a.l.k.e.r._loner]

This "____-gate" shit needs to stop. Now.

Re:sigh

[hughbar]

Stopshitgategate ?

Re:sigh

[freeze128]

...and what the hell is a "color scientist"? Is there really a need for them in our society? Do they do anything besides comment on trending photos?

Re:sigh

[Livius]

Aside from Shawinigate (the pun was just too good), it doesn't exist outside the US.

Re:sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

Golgafinchan Ark B - look it up

Re:sigh

[s.t.a.l.k.e.r._loner]

Touche, my young son. Touche.

Re:sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

stopstopshitgategategate

Re:sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

I know you Republicans are still sensible about all of your crimes, but this is ridiculous. All you people are criminals. Also, all you people are racists. Get over it. We know what your kind is like. Watergate is still a daily remember of your kind. You people broke into an office then lied about it. You need to be put in prison for what your kind did. You are disgusting. Just get over it and admit to being a horrible person. It's just like the National Socialists that whine in Germany. When I lived there, the Nazis used to whine about being associated with Nazies. Get over it. If you're a Nazi, then you're a Nazi.

Re:sigh

[tehcyder]

This "____-gate" shit needs to stop. Now.

Since Watergate was back in 1972, I think your protest is a bit tardy.

Comparison over multiple screens

[MassEnergySpaceTime]

Earlier tonight, I compared the same picture on the same site using 3 different computer monitors side by side and 3 different tablet screens.

To me, the white/blue part of the dress is sort of a pale light blue on all 6 screens. But they're different shades of pale blue. On one screen, the blue stand outs a little stronger. On another screen, the blue seems more faded towards white.

For the black/gold/tan part of the dress, on some screens, the tan color seems more faded, making the darker part stronger, and I COULD call it black. I know it's not PURE black, and it's not as black as that cow patch thing in to the left of the dress. But I could call it a shade of black. On other screens, the tan part stands out more, and I would definitely not call that part black. I don't know if I would call it "gold", but I would call it tan/light brownish.

So I think the screen settings is one variable that contributes to what colors the user thinks they see in the dress picture.

For the situations where different people are looking at the same screen or printed photograph, my guess is that the variability comes from the color/brightness/etc sensitivity of their eyes. For example, in my own eyes, one of them sees the wall in a brighter shade of white (and possibly slightly red tinted) than the other eye. Perhaps those who aren't as sensitive to blue might see the blue/white part of the dress as a shade of white, and call it white.

I guess this picture is just one of those freak pictures where the colors are at some borderline that could be interpreted as one shade of color or another.

Chemistry

[Anonymous Coward]

In high school I often failed parts of chemistry practical work because, while the stuff I produced was right, I failed to describe the colour "appropriately".

Slashdot can do video, but not an image?

[wonkey_monkey]

Couldn't Slashdot post the image in the summary? I mean, it's not even like it'd be an illustration; this article is literally all about a specific image.

You can do it with annoying autoplaying videos, so why not a simple JPEG?

Re:Slashdot can do video, but not an image?

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be new around here.

Re:Slashdot can do video, but not an image?

[Anonymous Coward]

> You can do it with annoying autoplaying videos, so why not a simple JPEG?

Because that would devalue embedded videos for advertisements and pet-projects.

Re:Slashdot can do video, but not an image?

[slashdice]

and what does frequent contributor Bennett Hasselton think about it?

Re:Slashdot can do video, but not an image?

[Anonymous Coward]

The annoying ad videos will continue until morale improves.

Initially saw Gold/White, Also saw Black/Blue

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw both, after obscuring the top of the image and looking at something else bright for a while. It was kinda trippy in that respect because I already knew I saw it as white-gold (I have a dark Twitter background)

Diversion

[Anonymous Coward]

While the media told us to obsess over an optical illusion, the federal government gave itself regulatory powers over the Internet. Coincidence?

Re:Diversion

[Anonymous Coward]

The FCC does a consumer-friendly action and out of the woodwork comes lots of "anonymous" people (clearly not industry shills!!) decrying it. Coincidence?

Histogram

[TrashGod]

For reference, here's a histogram of the image's RGB color components.

"reflections"

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, evidence has shown the actual dress is blue and black. But the idiocy of a lot of people astounds me, going on about how the black just looks brownish because of "reflections". Black reflecting light doesn't look like that in life, no black ever looks like that in life, and whoever says that it does, is just trying to convince themselves of something. Or being stupid.

The only reason the dark parts look the way they do is because of a seriously bad camera that washed out the picture.

Re:"reflections"

[jrumney]

The black looks gold because the camera's auto white balance removed the blue. Simple as that.

Re:"reflections"

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. That's why people seeing blue and black have something wrong with their brain. Especially the black.

obligatory schoolhouse rhyme

[jabberw0k]

In http://xkcd.com/1492/
Columbus sailed the ocean gold

They'll tell you black is really white.

[Anonymous Coward]

The moon is just the sun at night.
...
They'll blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
  Logic is a wreath of pretty flowers which smell bad. LLAP

There's a third camp

[Zcar]

Blue and orangish brown. That's what I see.

Re:There's a third camp

[Anonymous Coward]

Me too.

Here is something else most people do not consider. Not everyone's eyes are the same. It is why you see some people dress with poor color coordination. It seems ~1/3rd of the population is not susceptible to this particular white balance illusion.

Even the 'white dress' one linked from the summary. It looked pink to me even before I read the article saying 'look again its pink'.

Tried on 3 different monitors and different angles. Same blue/goldish brown to me. If I blow out the contrast and set the temp different I can 'sorta' get the illusion.

Re:There's a third camp

[David_Hart]

Blue and orangish brown. That's what I see.

That's what I see too.

Granted, my first off-the-cuff reaction was white and gold, partially because I was expecting white/gold or blue/black due to the choices presented. Expectation has a lot to do with what we perceive. However, when I looked closer for a minute or two my color perception shifted to blue/burnt orange and that's all I see now.

Re:There's a third camp

[Anonymous Coward]

Showed it to my wife. White and gold. Blue and brown/gold to me. Hm weird...

Color Illusion

[physicsphairy]

The XKCD plot just makes me see gold and white at different levels of brightness. But I did find this color illusion featuring yellow and blue. The dogs are actually the same color, which you see if you look at them individually through a small aperture
http://i.imgur.com/sh5NwCK.jpg

Make it pretty obvious that at some point your brain switches from wanting to see blue to wanting to see yellow based on the color context. It would appear some of us are slightly different in where transitions like that occur.

Same thing with Daleks

[wonkey_monkey]

Is the Dalek on the left red or yellow?

http://horman.net/avisynth/dal...

Re:Same thing with Daleks

[brianerst]

Um... orange?

What's really intersting here is....

[rizole]

...not the colour perception issue IMO but that this has caused such a big storms on the tubes in the first place. I got shown the picture yesterday and could see it could be blue or white and it's difficult to tell which given the poor lighting. I mean we've all more or less got cameras in our pockets or bags all the time these days, how have so many people missed seeing poorly lit, bad quality pics with white balance issues?

Re:What's really intersting here is....

[Al Al Cool J]

Really? because I'm surprised at those who downplay it.

When you see it as blue-black it looks really blue-black. When you see it as white-gold it looks really white-gold. It's astonishing when you have two groups of people looking at the same thing at the same time under the same lighting conditions and seeing such radically different things, to the point that is unimaginable for each that the other person could be seeing what they say they're seeing.

What I find intereresting is that in all of recorded history, no painting, photograph, or object has ever exhibited this property in such an extreme and shocking way before. If it only work on LCDs then that might explain it, but I don't know if that's been established.

I took an elbow to the face last night...

[urbster1]

When I woke up this morning, my eye was all white and gold.

Its light blue and brown

[TomGreenhaw]

I checked with photoshop...

White-n-Gold, Then Black-n-Blue

[Zamphatta]

I originally saw it as white & gold when I saw it on a forum Thursday night, and figured it was being posted by trolls 'cause they were asking people what color it was even when it was obviously white & gold. Friday morning I saw it on the news on TV, and they explained that some people see it as black & blue. I thought that was a bit crazy, but after a few minutes, I was suddenly able to see it as black & blue......and I can switch back & forth between the two color sets if I try hard. Awesome.

Omg, my GF talked to me about it

[Eloking]

For the first time ever, /. reported one of the uninteresting daily gossip from of girlfriend. SHAME ON YOU /. !!!!

Re:Omg, my GF talked to me about it

[burtosis]

Lmafo yes the same happened to me +1000

Re:Omg, my GF talked to me about it

[tehcyder]

For the first time ever, /. reported one of the uninteresting daily gossip from of girlfriend. SHAME ON YOU /. !!!!

Yeah, GF, sure. You could at least try to sound plausible.

Re:Omg, my GF talked to me about it

[Eloking]

For the first time ever, /. reported one of the uninteresting daily gossip from of girlfriend. SHAME ON YOU /. !!!!

Yeah, GF, sure. You could at least try to sound plausible.

Yeah I do have a girlfriend and she's into stuff like Vampire Diaries, Pretty Little Liars, Gossip Girl, Keeping Up with the Kardashians and the likes.

But I convinced to start LoZ and she finished OoT and MM, just started WW, which is nice.

And yeah she showed me that dress picture in the morning asked me what colour it was.

XKCD to the rescue

[McLae]

OK, so why is XKCD the only place that explains this so it makes sense? 3 million bloggers, countless news stories, and this one cartoon ups them all. Question, is XKCD genius, or the others idiots? (or both?)

While I was reading this...

[JohnnyDoesLinux]

I realized that I the time wasted could have been used for a good fart. ... Ummm nevermind.

Can they put that dress in pure day light ?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, now they owe internet what is the true color of that dress.

Can they put that dress in pure day light and take a decent neutral photo ?

This is just a facebook regular shit and nothing else.

Dressgate??!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Dressgate? Seriously? Just kill me already.

Re:Dressgate??!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I know right. Idiocracy here we come!

It's a macro quantum effect dress..tongue in cheek

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a "quantum effect dress" on a macro scale. It's really both "white and gold" and "black and blue" until observed. Every time you observe the dress and see "White and Gold" somewhere in the universe a cat dies in a box.

rubbish

[rkoot]

1. save picture. 2. open picture in image editor 3. invert colours. 4. voila.

It's neither

[renergy]

Hardly I'm the only one who see (dirty) gold and (light) Blue(ish)...

Absolute stupidity

[Khyber]

Shitty potatophone camera fucks up picture, the internet loses its fucking mind over colors.

Re:Absolute stupidity

[itzly]

okay, okay, but what colors do you see ?

Re:Absolute stupidity

[Anonymous Coward]

Like

Re:Absolute stupidity

[Khyber]

I don't see colors, I see the electro-magnetic spectrum in the range of 380nm-740nm.

Colors are for artists.

Re:Absolute stupidity

[Anonymous Coward]

Due to the wide variety of light intensity and light colour experienced in the natural world, if we always saw things in the exact colours produced by the incident light reflecting back off them, nothing would ever look the same colour twice. This would probably drive you mad, and would not be at all helpful to survival. To counter this our visual system has evolved to use cues from the environment to assess the lighting conditions and then compensate for these when building up an internal image - so when this works well you see the object as it would look under more average lighting conditions and can thereby correctly identify its normal colour. Being able to do this must have been an evolutionary advantage.

As a result, this whole dress colour thing is not about what colour you can scientifically measure in the picture, this is probably IS somewhere around off-white and brown/gold. It is about what interpretation your brain puts on it, and the fact that people differ in this respect. The dress is actually blue and black, and the people seeing it as gold/white are seeing it that way because they have been unable to accurately compensate for the extreme lighting conditions. Your visual processing is attempting to compensate for the rather extreme variations from the norm in light intensity and colour in this picture, and present an internal picture of what the dress should look like in more normal lighting. It is actually amazing to me that so many people can end up with a correct interpretation of the original blue/black colour, given this photo as a starting point.

There may be an element of training the brain in this - for example I do a lot of photography and I am well used to the fact that man-made black materials are not actually black i.e. they do not absorb all colour light 100%. Under extreme lighting most nominally black material reflects back some light. Sometimes it reflects back equal amounts of all colours and looks grey, but sometimes it reflects back more of one colour, especially when the incident light is not white, and so takes on a colour tint light like the black parts of the dress. This training probably helps my brain to come up with an internal image which is correctly coloured back and blue, albeit somewhat washed out due to over-exposure. I have occasionally seen a quick flash of the picture looking white/gold, but can't maintain it - the correction kicks in and it reverts back to blue/black.

Don't assume that what you see in your mind's eye is a scientifically accurate measurement of what is actually out there, but it may be an accurate representation of what something would look like in average lighting conditions, even if you are viewing it under extreme lighting conditions.

Re:Absolute stupidity

[Anonymous Coward]

Such an angry little virgin.

Re:Absolute stupidity

[Al Al Cool J]

Have you been in a room with two different groups of intelligent perceptive people, all looking at the same picture on the same screen and seeing two totally different sets of colours, and screaming at each other because of it?

Maybe you have, maybe you haven't. But those who haven't experienced it, are probably not the best persons to judge it. Just saying.

Re:Absolute stupidity

[Foreign Entity]

The point isn't that the picture is shitty. The point is that two people are observing the SAME picture, and seeing two drastically different color combinations. The psychology behind this is facinating.

Re:Absolute stupidity

[serviscope_minor]

Yes but it's popular and sadly too many slashdotters not only feel that have too much nerd cool to ever be interested in something normal people are interested in but feel the need to tell us about it too.

Re:Absolute stupidity

[tehcyder]

I don't see colors, I see the electro-magnetic spectrum in the range of 380nm-740nm.

Colors are for artists.

Everyone say hi to slashdot's new GUI programmer.

Re:Absolute stupidity

[tehcyder]

Yes but it's popular and sadly too many slashdotters not only feel that have too much nerd cool to ever be interested in something normal people are interested in but feel the need to tell us about it too.

It's similar to the hipster "I liked X before it was popular" thing. Intellectual snobbery.

Are you serious?

[Rambo Tribble]

You actually expect us to answer that question without a Pantone chart?

It's a trick question

[HeadlessNotAHorseman]

I blogged about it here (with a bonus explanation for how religion works), but in essence the question as asked presents you with two incorrect answers (each possible answer has one colour correct, one incorrect), so you pick one of them and then argue with everyone else that you are right.

Re:It's a trick question

[Anonymous Coward]

The actual dress is black and blue, so "Spoiler alert: The correct answer is that it is neither." is horse shit. So is your explanation. The dress looks black and blue to some people and white and gold to others, regardless of whether they've heard or read any question or comment about it or not.

SHUT THE FUCK UP.

[Anonymous Coward]

I am so fucking sick and tired of hearing about that goddamn dress, you cunts. Shut your fucking gob.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Auto-adjust levels Corel Photopaint

[BenJeremy]

Bam, Blue and Black.

Q.E.D.

Bad lighting, bad camera, lazy picture taker.

Re:Auto-adjust levels Corel Photopaint

[itzly]

But that's not what this is about. It's about two groups of people seeing different things when looking at the same picture.

Re:Auto-adjust levels Corel Photopaint

[thejynxed]

What is interesting to me, is the fact that the brain itself might be operating automatically in a way that color correction software does when working with photographs for some people, while for others it simply does not do so in a consistent manner, or at all.

That being said, my first self-response when seeing the photo was "The entire photo looks wrong".

I saw a kind of bluish-white and the kind of brown with yellow hints that you see when you shine a flashlight that gives off "yellow" light through dyed black cloth (which is also similar to the effect you get when you apply a little chlorine to cloth that has been dyed black).

Another thing that I found personally interesting to me, was that from my perception, the overall photo itself seemed to have had a blue tint to it, as if the room it was taken in was being lit by a LED light similar to the ones I have in my bathroom (when first turned on, the light they give off is very blue-shifted until they warm up and become a very bright white).

White & Gold

[jomcty]

In our house, three of us see the dress as white/gold, while two of us see blue/black. My parents saw the dress as blue/black. Colorblind Assistant sees basically soft brown/soft blue. Interesting indeed.

Shitty photo

[Anonymous Coward]

All of this because someone took a shitty photo and a whole bunch of people were too stupid to realise that simple fact.

I see..

[Anonymous Coward]

the colors "much ado about nothing" and "zero fucks given".

The goddamn pen is rrrroyal blue.

Actual Dress Colour

[XB-70]

The actual colour of the dress is "No, That Dress Does NOT Make You Look Fat."

Huh?

[daveime]

Am I the only one who sees blue and gold?

Re:Huh?

[iggymanz]

no, the "white" I see as defintely of a bluish hue, but of the kind I expect on a white shirt in shadow. So I say "gold white" looking at the dress, but looking at it in corner of my eye while looking away from it I see black / purple! My family is half/half divided on what the colors are, which is funny

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, you're not the only one!

That's just one part of the elephant

[SuperKendall]

It's primarily an effect of the camera fooling around with the white balance and contrast/light to try to get a correct image and failed.

This is not the whole story - the first time I saw it I saw a strongly blue/black dress, which no apparent white balance issues..

The white balance being off is part of the effect to be sure. But so is the surroundings (as XKCD refers to). But that's not the main story either, because no matter what I do both sides of the XKCD image look at least light blue. In some conditions the dress in the original photo appears pure white.

I think it's combination of all those factors but then at the end, a large push from the brain one direction or the other.

The individual theories are like the blind man around the elephant, each convinced it knows what is there from a part...

Add to it that the picture looks different depending on which display you have

That's the thing - looking at the EXACT SAME DISPLAY from minute to minute can show you different colors. I've seen it flip multiple times, on the same monitor in the same lighting conditions. That's the aspect that is amazing to most people, is they can see it change under almost any condition.

Re:That's just one part of the elephant

[arglebargle_xiv]

... that dress...

What dress?

Looks different on same display at same angle

[SuperKendall]

Ask the person next to you, and they will tell you it is blue and black. Turn your screen towards them and the effect will be reversed.

I looked at the image on my phone. It appeared strongly blue/black.

I showed the image to my wife, straight on. Same angle. To her the image appeared STRONGLY white/gold, when I asked her if there was any blue at all she said no...

Same image on the same display at the same angle, within a minute or so.

Re: Looks different on same display at same angle

[shahlak]

Same here. I see white & gold and my husband blue & black irrespective of the angle. I also read an interesting theory that most men see blue & black and women white & gold. I forwarded the pic to one of my girls group on whatsapp, but was surprised that majority said blue & black. Another, theory says mostly older people will see blue & black. My parents saw blue & black, so it could be true for them. But my husband, me and my younger sibling are under 30. Everyone else except me saw blue and black.

This is a technical forum FFS

[Anonymous Coward]

The dress is bluish purple and an drab gold colour in that photo. End of story.
Install the "color picker" addon for firefox and hover over the relevant areas and you'll see the RGB values.

The blue areas have a high blue content, and the closest colour in colour tables for the "black area" is one of the goldenrods.

Your eyes may perceive it differently, but the RGB values don't change.

I've only seen it as blue/gold. Not white/gold nor blue/black. Both of these later ones are wrong. The photo's white balance is obviously horrible.

Wrong interpretation

[SuperKendall]

It is blue and black, but if you up the lighting, and/or display it against a white background the black lace part looks golden.

In the XCKD comic the dress on the BLUE background has "black" that appears golden. In the original image the dress is on a white background, but apparently to 75% of people it appears white/gold...

Re:Wrong interpretation

[serviscope_minor]

In the XCKD comic the dress on the BLUE background has "black" that appears golden. In the original image the dress is on a white background, but apparently to 75% of people it appears white/gold...

On the blue background, you believe the light is blue. So, the blueish tinge on the white is from the light and the golden gold is more or less unchanged. On the one with the orange faced person, you believe the light is strong yellow, so the illuminated colour must be blue, not white and that implies the black will have an orange hue.

The thing is not the background but what your brain intreprets the light colour as. Tweaking the background is not the only way to achieve it but it is a way to do it reasonably reliably. What's amazing is that some people's brain succeeds in correctly interpreting the light and colour despite having very little and washed out background.

But anyway, the point is the ligt not the background.

Re:Wrong interpretation

[SuperKendall]

The thing is not the background but what your brain intreprets the light colour as. Tweaking the background is not the only way to achieve it but it is a way to do it reasonably reliably.

As I said though, it's not really the same effect. The dress looks Blue/Black to me in the XKCD comic on both sides, on the dark background it just looks like a lighter shade of blue.

At times the original dress image to me (and others) has looked pure white, not just a light blue. I agree it's about interpretation of the light color, the surprising thing is how strong the interpretation is - either way. That's something the XKCD comic does not convey at all.

Re:Wrong interpretation

[serviscope_minor]

the surprising thing is how strong the interpretation is - either way.

It's *vast*.

If you're a bit of a programmer and have some time, try the following.

Find a red object (or any other colour of your choice) and photograph it in a variaty of conditions, e.g. indoors, outdoors under different lughts, with or without a flash and so on and so forth. Write a script to extract the pixels from the object (make sure the object completely covers some square or circle in the middle of the image to make this possible, you don't need all of the pixels after all), and create an image out of the resulting pixels. You might want to sort them by for example absolute intensity on one axis and relative proportion of blue on the other (and otherwise random).

You will be amazed at the sheer variety of colours that make up the same "red". Not only that but you always strongly perceive the object as the same colour despite these.

The multiple parts that make up the effect

[SuperKendall]

Everyone seems to have a singular theory as to why the dress looks different, but each one by itself normally does not have such a dramatic effect as this.

In the interest of science I am going to lay out all of the various aspects of the dress I think together contribute to the ability of the dress to appear strong blue/black or strongly white/gold:

Main aspects:
White balance of course, lending a slight yellow cast to the blacks.
Pure white background.
Hint of golden object to far left bottom.
Gradient strength of lighting from top to bottom, that is to say the bottom blacks are purer black than the very top.

Questionable but probable:
Brain itself deciding to lock into a specific color instead of a washed out color.
Possibly frequency of stripes?

I think the brain is the wildcard here, I think all of the other conditions contribute to leading the image to a place where it's exactly on the cusp between two possibilities for the brain to register.... either the brain sees a washed out blue, thinks of white in shade and thinks of the dress as white so then the black gets shifted along with it to gold.

Or the brain latches on to the black first, darkens that, and then the blue gets pulled along with it and seen as a strong blue.

Re:The multiple parts that make up the effect

[serviscope_minor]

Basically, given there colours, there are two equally plausible interpretations: normal blue light or very strong yellow light. Depending on which you perceive the colours look gold/white or black/blue. It seems in this regard the brain won't go half way and is either all in one interpretation or the other.

I think it happens this way because the photo is genuinely ambiguous between two quite different interpretations and is exactly in a region where people differ, rather than everyone going one way (pedantically, colour is always ambiguous---try interpreting any colour under low pressure sodium lamps).

Re:The multiple parts that make up the effect

[SuperKendall]

I agree, the amazing thing to me is the same person can see it differently at different times (but very close together) given different cues before they see the picture.

As you say, all around it's right between two possibilities and the brain can take it one way or the other.

Display test

[Anonymous Coward]

The answer depends FAR MORE on the characteristics of the display you are using than anything to do with the person. Try viewing the image on different devices and different angles/brightness. This is all a massive hullabaloo about basically nothing. News flash, displays have a WIDE variety of color reproduction!

Re: Typical nerd

[DocHoncho]

Even worse, a clothes hanger!

What if it's both?

[Anonymous Coward]

Blue Lizard Sunscreen is the original "is it white / is it blue" question. With a bottle that changes from white to blue in UV light, they let you know when dangerous Rays are out and your skin needs to be protected. So "is it white, is it blue" .. Who cares as long as it's Blue Lizard! Learn more at www.bluelizard.net.

Crazy People

[PPH]

Trying to evaluate colors based on a digital photograph, which may have been white balanced who knows how. And then uploaded through Instagram filtering algorithms. And finally viewed on various displays that have been tweaked (or mis-configured) to suit different users' tastes.

The xkcd cartoon illustrates one kind of optical illusion. But that's not what is going on here (or on Instagram/whatever). Because you can download two copies of the photo, one that appears white and gold, the other that appears blue and black. And you can actually verify, using various graphics tools, that the colors are actually different. It's not really a visual illusion produced by human perception. Its the result of massive post processing of a digital image.

Re:Crazy People

[itzly]

It's not really a visual illusion produced by human perception. Its the result of massive post processing of a digital image.

If it's not a human perception issue, how do you explain two groups of people in the same room, looking at the same picture, and strongly disagreeing about the colors ?

Re:Crazy People

[Anonymous Coward]

Trying to evaluate colors based on a digital photograph, which may have been white balanced who knows how. And then uploaded through Instagram filtering algorithms. And finally viewed on various displays that have been tweaked (or mis-configured) to suit different users' tastes.

And yet many people correctly see the dress as blue and black, which is what the actual dress really is.

The xkcd cartoon illustrates one kind of optical illusion. But that's not what is going on here (or on Instagram/whatever).

No. That absolutely is what is going on here. I downloaded a copy locally and I've seen it either way at different times.

Because you can download two copies of the photo, one that appears white and gold, the other that appears blue and black. And you can actually verify, using various graphics tools, that the colors are actually different. It's not really a visual illusion produced by human perception. Its the result of massive post processing of a digital image.

You can also download the original yourself and show it to different people. You will get two different answers, no digital editing required.

More interesting than the ambiguity of the picture is the variety of explanations spoken with complete confidence that people pull straight out of their ass.

Re:Crazy People

[PPH]

I get what's going on now.

It may have started as a demonstration of poor color encoding, white balance and perception. But it quickly morphed into a demonstration of suggestibility.

There are (at least) three dress pictures out there. Not counting the re-balanced original. The first was of a blue and black dress, probably taken with a cheap camera phone. And that started it all off. The dress, way overexposed (mis-balanced) looked white and gold (tan, yellow, etc.) But the photographer knew it was supposed to be blue and black. So they posted this and started the discussion. Finally, some professional equipment was taken out, the dress photographed and proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that it's blue and black.

But there are at lest two other photos out there. A photoshopped copy of the original (thanks, /b/tards), with the colors changed to white and yellow. And a second dress with a very similar striped pattern, white and tan. But if you look closely, its not the same one and it has been cropped so as to eliminate background cues. Now, if you show these two pictures to people, some will still say "blue and black". But its not a matter of perception anymore. Thee two photos were never blue and black. Its all about suggestion. People 'know' that its blue and black because they've been told so. So that's the correct answer.

It's sort of like the Jimmy Kimmel Man on the Street prank interviews, where someone asks a passer-by a question about something that never happened. And they formulate an answer, just to sound well informed. And they might even believe that the incident in question actually happened when they walk away.

Perception of Colour before a Light or Dark Bkgrnd

[johnrpenner]

GOETHE explained this through the effect of turbidity on the perception of colour.

Light shining through a darker medium yields yellow; whereas an illuminated turbid medium before a dark background yields blue.

Check out: Light Darkness and Colours @time: 23:30 on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

This is remarkable

[LostMonk]

This is certainly a first . . . I don't believe there ever was a subject that lost my interest or got on my nerves that quickly.

I'm not gay

[Anonymous Coward]

... so I don't know shit about colors. Or care.

Blue and Gold

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone that says otherwise is literally color blind.

Green or Brown tie?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a tie that is green indoors and brown outdoors. When I started buying suits, I was told to go outside to determine the "real" color.

Every backstage movie, where they show the dressing room, you can see a row of lights around the mirror. They are balanced to match the stage lights, so that the performers look good on stage.

And, of course, the modern automatic camera adjusts the color for you.

I am more concerned about the poor understanding of science exhibited by the TV reporters on this matter.

Re:Green or Brown tie?

[Mes]

Had a similar experience with brown and green. Bought a beautiful chocolate brown couch for my office, but when it was brought indoors under the florescent lights, it was an ugly puke green. I was sure they delivered the wrong couch until I took a cushion outside and it was dark brown again.

You've got the color channel information

[g01d4]

Why the controversy regarding some bizarre conjunction of lighting and camera response? Match the color channel information with color test images and you're done.

Re:You've got the color channel information

[iggymanz]

Wrong answer, the "color" in question here is entirely a matter of human perception. Color channel information is irrelevant to issue.

Too bad the flash wasn't used.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd rather talk about Jeffrey Epstein

Re:Perception has nothing to do with it...

[Fallen Kell]

You have a shit calibrated monitor/display. The reason why most people see white+gold is because the majority of monitors have crappy color calibration, lumen balance, contrast, and white/black levels, especially "out of the box". My monitors are calibrated at the factory and come with custom color map for each monitor from the factory, so that they have less than 0.1dE2000 from sRGB.

This is why your iPhone 5 or 6 shows the image and it looked black+blue (they have "decent" color calibration of under 2.5dE2000, but that still is not even close to the 0.1dE2000 of a really good monitor), and most probably is still pushing way to many lumens for environment, which washes out the image (making it look white+gold).

Too much information is lost in the photo

[mark-t]

Sampling the pixels directly from the image reveals that the dress color in the photo has a hue between in or around the range of 230 or so, which happens to be blue. However, because it appears that the dress was not directly lit, that hue may be arising because of diffuse interreflections with its surroundings, something that anything which has a lighter shade can be very susceptible to if the only light hitting it is diffused, and which is the kind of lighting that this dress does appear to be exposed to in the photo.

So there is simply too much information about the surrounding lighting conditions that has been lost from the photo to ascertain with any certainty what the actual color of the dress is... at least from this one photograph alone.

Debating the matter is pointless, because it is impossible to actually arrive at a logically valid conclusion merely from what one can see in this photograph except through sheer guesswork.

W&G, was Re:White balance and contrast in came

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is a pretty good explanation of why this might happen.

Why is it that my mod points always expire right *before* I want to use them? I used eight of fifteen purely on posts where I only sort of wanted to mod. I had to give up commenting to do so. Here, I log in so as to mod -- and my mod points are gone. And I have no real interest in commenting!

Grrrr.

Anyway, regardless of the general quality (or lack thereof) of gizmodo, this was a decent explanation. It points out that in the picture, the colors are pale blue and dark gold. However, the original dress is a darker blue and black. The colors in the picture are incorrect. People who see it as blue and black are seeing past the problems with the picture while those who see white and gold are being fooled by the bad colors in the image.

Actual dress is the blue and black one on the left in this picture: http://media.gotraffic.net/ima...

Come on

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Unless your display device is calibrated by a device specifically designed to do so and (most often) costing more than the display itself, you're kidding yourself if you think you know what colors are in the images on your display.

2. If you didn't take the picture and know the lighting conditions and proper white balance for those conditions at the time of the photograph, you're kidding yourself if you think you know what colors are in the images on your display.

3. Stop being an ignoramus and kidding yourself if you think you know what colors are in the images on your display if the display isn't calibrated and you didn't take the picture or have a professionally printed reference image.

I can give you a pure white image and some of you will tell me it's blue, some will tell me it's pink, some will tell me it's slightly green and few will tell me it's actually white. There are too many variables (especially across multiple displays, even of the same model and manufacturer) for anyone but the image author to tell you what the proper colors are unless you both have calibrated displays. Even calibrated, there will be slight differences due to error tolerances. The only one who knows what colors were in that dress is the woman that took the photo. The debate is as stupid as the one my buddy does at parties: How many layers of bread are there in a double-decker peanut butter and jelly sandwich? He asks the question to start a debate at just about every gathering and I want to punch him in the face!

It is not just the ambient light.

[Ecuador]

Me and my wife, as well as other couples see it in the same light but interpret it differently. I was sure it can't possibly be interpreted as blue/black, at most I would say it could be thought of as blue/bronze, but I asked my wife in the same room what color it is and she immediately said "blue/black of course". Neither of us could "see" it the other way. Until I opened an image someone made of how the white gold would look in a proper photo. So, after looking at this photo for a bit, I went back to the original and I could finally see it as black/blue!

No, it is not environmental light.

[Anonymous Coward]

There are many accounts of people looking at the photo while being right next to each other and disagreeing. Some see a white/gold dress in a shadow, others see a black/blue dress with a warm light hitting it, under the same conditions. Sometimes they do change opinion when they see it in a dark room etc, however it has more to do with how the brain processes the image.

There is no "Silver Bullet" answer.

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason that we seeing different colors is that there are many factors are in play.

1) There are many people that are colorblind and do not know it. There are different kinds of colorblindness. Youtube
2) Color only exist in our minds. Youtube
3) If lighting in the room changes then the color changes. If you put a red light in a room then a “white” sheet of paper will look red. Takes crayons outside at night. Most streetlights give off a different color of light. The colors will change. On some websites they change White Balance of a photo. The effect you are seeing is Retinex theory. Wikipedia
4) The screen colors that you using are not the same as other peoples screen color. There is equipment to correct the screens. Youtube
5) There is effect called Color Constancy. Video is getting into the physiology of color. Youtube

The color of dress is a effect of the factors above. The color that you see is correct.

We all see the world differently. Please respect others views.

Re: Typical nerd

[penguinoid]

Worse, it isn't even being occupied by a pretty girl

Was too distracted discussing the physics/psychology of the color to notice.

Welcome to the future

[Anonymous Coward]

It turns out that Idiocracy was wildly over-optimistic.

Re: Typical nerd

[Anonymous Coward]

ur mom

Wow

[Simulant]

Ya'll must be lonely.

It's painfully obvious from the comments that few people actually looked at the picture with along someone else. The camera doesn't matter. Nor does the quality of the picture. Two people looking at the same (admittedly crappy but that's beside the point) picture on the same device can see different colors. What you see may also change when you look again. I usually see white & gold but on two occasions it's been blue and black.

&is "teal" blue with greenish tinge or vice-ve

[Ungrounded Lightning]

... blue and brown. Just now, I opened the Washington Post link on my 24" screen in a sunlit room, and it was clearly white and gold.

Though the sensations are vastly different, brown is really dark yellow. The underlying color of that part of this dress seems to be very near the perceptual boundary (probably just on the yellow side of it). This picture seems to have the dress in a non-obvious shadow, so when it is viewed by someone whose visual system doesn't adequately pick up the shadowing and compensate, it crosses the boundary and appears light brown rather than dark yellow.

Another perceptual oddity is that a very slight bluish tinge to white makes it appear "whiter than white", especially in sunlight or other strong lighting. (I suspect this works by mimicing the differential response of the various color sensors in the eye when exposed to very bright light, though blue may also "cancel out" a bit of the yellowing of aging cloth.) Laundry products up through the 1950s or so included "bluing", a mild blue dye for producing the effect. (It fell out of use when it was replaced by a fluorescent dye that reradated energy from ultraviolet as blue, making the cloth literally "brighter than white" {where "white" is defined as diffuse reflection of 100% of the incoming light}, and which, if mixed with detergent products, would stick to the cloth while the surficant was rinsed away.) I suspect some of the "blueish is brighter" effect is going on here.

When I view the picture straight-on on my LCD display, the light cloth on the upper part of the dress appears about white and the image appears somewhat washed out. Meanwhile the lower half has a bluish tinge. So I suspect the cloth is actually nearly-white with a bit of blue. (Viewed off-axis it's very blue, but the other colors are over-saturated and/or otherwise visibly off-color. So off-axis viewing makes it look more blue and this probably adds to the controversy.)

Another color-perception issue is "teal", a color between blue and green. There are paint formulations of this color that give the sensation of "distinctly blue with a greenish tinge" to some people and "distinctly green with a bluish tinge" to others, even under the same lighting and viewed from the same angle. (I'm in the "slightly-bluish-green" camp.)

The first place I encountered this was on the guitar of the filksinger Clif Flint. (On which he played _Unreality Warp_: "... I'm being followed by maroon shadows ..." B-) ) Apparently his fans occasionally had arguments about whether his guitar was blue or green, so he sometimes headed this off (or started it off on a more friendly levl) by commenting on the effect.

no, SAME image perceived two different ways

[iggymanz]

Group of people looking at the SAME picture have one of two different views of the color. Half the people in my family saw white and gold (myself included), half blue-black. In fact, if I have that image in corner of my vision it is black-purple, but goes to white - gold after only moving head twenty degrees toward image.

It's very much how human brain perceives color based on (simulated in this case) ambient lighting; this picture is on the dividing line so to speak

It's not blue&black and neither white&gold

[koinu]

Please learn to use your eyes properly.

Occam and Shannon necessitates gold-on-silver.

[Anonymous Coward]

> Although it was confirmed that the dress actually was blue and black

This statement, currently contained in the ciorresponding Wikipedia article, is not possible, because black is not a colour, but the total lack of light reflection. If the dress actually had black stripes applied onto blue fabric as claimed, the digital camera sensor of the smartphone would have recorded an (almost) total lack of signal for those stripe lines, no matter what the colour temperature (kelvin balance) was in the environment at the time. That's because black fabric does not reflect.

However, many people see a silverly dress with golden stripings in the photo. If the camera recorded (almost) NIL signal for the stripes, as in black lace, than the brains of those people must have created a significant colour channel signal out of thin air, entirely nothing, to fill in the the place of black stripes. This is against Occam's razor, thus cannot be accepted as scientific fact!

Therefore, it is logically necessary that people who interpret the photo to show black stripes on a blue dress, are incorrect and the dress was objectively gold-on-white. Their brains drop an existing (gold) colour signal entirely and changes another colour channel (silver) into blue, for yet unknown psycho-physical reasons. This is possible, because loss and/or alteration of information in not against Shannon's theorem, but the creation of colour channel information out of black-body nothingness, is against Occam's law! QED.

At let me put the IQ 75 common sense in the closing part: have you ever seen a dark blue with black lace themed lady's wedding dress? Would the priest let the couple into the chapel on sight of such weird outfit? No and no, as it's more fitting for a funeral. On the other hand, lady wedding gown with white to silver base colour fabric and with silver or gold gaudy decorations is totally the norm in the western / european-rooted / graeco-roman-christian cultural tradition. Thus, Occam's razor once again impresses the dress was not dark coloured!

Huh? Who cares? Is this Slashdot or Vapid News?

[Anonymous Coward]

The only dress that has gotten more exposure than this stupid dress is Lewinsky's. And who cares about it?

Purkinje Effect

[NimbleSquirrel]

There are several factors that make this unintentional optical illusion really interesting.

The first, demonstrated by the xkcd, shows that the colours will appear markedly different with different coloured backgrounds. It doesn't fully explain what we are seeing here though, as people are seeing the two different states with the same background to the dress.

I believe that the main illusion comes down to the Purkinje Effect, and how our brains interpret colour. Under the Purkinje Effect, in lower light levels our peak visual sensitivity shifts to the blue end of the spectrum. At higher levels it shifts away from the blue end of the spectrum as the rod cells in our eyes reach a point of saturation and stop being effective. So, when ambient light is bright enough, we just don't perceive blues as well, and we just don't see differences in contrast as well (as the rod cells are responsible for contrast vision).

If your eyes are adapted to bright light conditions (and the threshold here varys from person to person), you will likely see white and gold. Due to the shift away from blue, dark greys in the image appear more yellow. The blue also becomes apparently lighter to the point that our brains interpret it as a white dress in the shadow in daylight. If you go into a darker environment and wait (it takes about 10-15 minutes for the rhodopsin in the rod cells to regenerate), you willl likely see the blue and dark grey/black.

The first time I saw this, I had just walked in from outside. I saw white and gold. Then after sitting in a darkened workshop for 30 minutes, I saw it as blue and dark grey.

Blue and Gold

[Anonymous Coward]

That is what I see.

Re:Perception has nothing to do with it...

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't. My monitor is calibrated and I have very good color acuity and you're wrong. There is no difference when viewing on an iPhone and your rationalisation is completely wrong. As are your numbers.

Incidentally, what is the color balance difference between your eyes? And yours and mine?

You are not alone

[the grace of R'hllor]

I fail to see it as anything other than blue and gold (well, brown/yellow that might be called gold)

Re:Stupid and Pointless OR Idiotic and Pointless?

[Anonymous Coward]

If it wasn't so true, I'd call you a troll.

Poorly-posed questions, not color perception

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact, my first reaction was "the dress is obviously white and gold in a terrible photograph, what kind of idiot would say it is blue and black?" I saw people attribute it to various effects that really cannot account for such a huge disparity, concluded they are all crazy, thought this was an interesting subject that I should post on, and then did research, which lead me to increasingly suspect that extremely few people actually initially believe that the image looks anything like royal blue and black, but they either read Wired's analysis of problems with the color balance (unlikely), or saw the designer's stock image which has good lighting and clearly shows the dress to be blue and black (likely), and then either disingenuously claim that they thought it looked blue and black all along (because the dress the original image has a slight blue tint), or they simply say "it's blue and black, duh!" without explaining that the "duh" is "searching for a better photo." And at the same time people are shouting "it's light blue-grey, I can tell by the pixels, dumbasses!" and others are construing that to support their position of "white" (of course! it's a bluish photo of a white dress!) or "blue" (exactly--the pixels are blue, because it's a blue dress!). Few people know what question is even really being discussed, and those that completely explain their answer (Wired) are either ignored or skimmed by everyone else, whether readers or bloggers.

The blog article in TFA, which is actually under the banner of the Washington Post, walks straight into this fallacy. Presumably the other media commentators are as well, or the WaPo blogger would have noticed. They see the furious difference of opinion on the twittersphere, or whatever crap they're using for "research," and then indiscriminately repeat it all, along with some people smugly pointing out how everyone is getting the wrong answer (to a question that they haven't bothered to define). The implicit conclusion is that the image has some mystical property that makes people deranged, though most of them are too stupid to realize it (even as those people are thinking something similar), until the WaPo blogger finally badly quotes a Wired blogger who actually figured out most of the truth. They realized that the common conclusions about what is wrong with the white balance are inconsistent over the whole image, and that if they balanced it from assumption that the darkest point should actually be black, the dress surprisingly turns blue and black. The WaPo blogger ignores most of the subtlety, because like everyone else, they just want to say "the dress is actually [blue and black] because people are too dumb to account for [the brain]" instead of "the color balance of this photograph is skewed in a very unexpected way that combined with its obvious background overexposure, leads most people to guess that it is a white/gold dress in underexposed overly-blue lighting--a very common white balance problem--instead of a blue and black dress in extremely overexposed lighting with disproportionate red saturation, which we were only able to realize after repeated filtering attempts." The real answer is apparently too long to be supported by the bulk of the combined twitter-/blogo-sphere, and so the "controversy" continues.

The many degenerate properties of the infamous photo are interesting, but mostly this "controversy" seems to be a fairly common, if unusually clear illustration of the problems with human mass-communication. Everyone gets a little information, leaps to a conclusion, sees that people disagree, and starts generating rationalizations to explain how the bulk of humanity is morons, except for them. Well, extremely few people are actually "morons," but a whole lot of people really are terrible at both receiving facts from communications and in turn, explaining them in their own communications. In f

How many people can see both of the combos?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is a funny thing: I can see both of the combos without having to tilt the screen on my laptop. In the morning, the dress was white-and-gold. In the evening, I saw the same picture on my wife's phone and it was blue-and-black. Today I started looking at the picture while scrolling up the article and as the picture scrolled up, the colors began to change from white-and-gold to black-and-blue. In other words, my perception of the picture changed depending on how much of the picture I saw.

YOU INSENSITIVE CLODS!

[occasional_dabbler]

I'm colourblind

Although the model sure does look hot in that clingy grey and slightly greyer dress ;-)

WOW!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

OK this is so cool. Yesterday my friend showed it to me because she thought she was going crazy because she saw white and gold. I saw blue and black and mostly all the other people she showed it to saw black and blue. Then when I got home I screenshot the pic she sent me, to see if I would see what she saw. Then like in 2 hours I looked at the same picture and I saw gold and white. I told my mom and she said I was hallucinating cuz she only saw it black and blue. This is cool! But now I dont see black and blue on the same pic, I keep on seeing white and gold. My brightness was the same every time I looked at it.

na

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey you fucking dumbshits --- it was a marking troll that --- GET THIS--- USED TWO DIFFERENT PICTURES!! DURRRRR! God damn you fucking "geniuses" on slashdur couldn't figure that out in like three seconds? Fucking give up and quit life, the lot of you

White & Gold

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw this yesterday late at night, it looked white & gold to me. Searched the internet only to find the dress is actually black & blue!!! No matter what I did, I still saw white and gold. Asked this question to my husband today morning, surprised why I am asking this he answered black and blue. He did laugh when I said I see white and gold thinking its a joke, until I explained how the world is going crazy about it.

So, I was happy he saw it differently because I wanted to understand how people are seeing it differently. So here are some facts, my conclusions & theories:

1. Yes the real dress is indeed Blue & Black but that does not mean that the color of its photo would & should look exactly like the dress. I am many of us must have come across bad clicks where colors of certain objects or garment looks slightly different than in reality!!!
2. Test1: I showed the Tumblr pic as well original dress pic from Amazon to my husband. He said that definitely what he sees in Tumblr is dark blue but lighter than what is shown as original dress in Amazon. The black for him was same in both cases, he could not see any brown.
2. I used color picker in MS paint to see what color gets picked(this was before I saw Deadspin post)....cont

Just making shots here...

[kefalonia]

The eye pupil is known to exhibit interesting behaviour at times,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
one notable being photic reflex (which also affects a quarter of a population)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

IMHO, human vision is still incompletely understood at whole population (global) level,
with all sorts of exceptions and special trade-off cases being documented:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
http://discovermagazine.com/20... ### check this one!

Finally, let's not forget, that it is well known that manly colour vocabulary is 4-bit, while females have true colour sets ;-O
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...
http://io9.com/5919311/some-wo...
https://www.google.be/search?r...

Last but not least: make sure you see the image of the OP in fractional ways (say, top 10th of the image),
along with another person that sees it in the alternative mode. You may come up with surprises. ;-)

Re: White and Gold

[Anonymous Coward]

What color picker showed was amazing. It showed the dress as light blue!!! My husband said it was lighter than the blue that he saw in the dress. To me it appeared only a little darker than what i see the dress as....white with a blue tint. So, far so good. I then selected the color of the lace, what appeared looked very very dark brown to me but my husband could not see any brown in it, he could only see black. I asked if the black is same as the black we see in default color palette of MS paint and he said no it is little lighter than that. So, i could that what we saw in color picker was actually the color of the dress in photo(not the color of the real dress). In reality it is in between what white & gold(brownish gold) or blue & black ppl see. So we are not seeing extremely different colors. Ours eyes are probably either making the colors look lighter ( white with blue tint & brownish gold) or darker ( dark blue & black).
3. Some, people might say the picture is not white/black balanced but hey, arent we debating abt the color of the dress in the photo rather than the actual dress, so it is better to consider the photo as is rather than photoshoping...it could better explain why we see the colors differently.

I've spent too much time in computer graphics

[Anonymous Coward]

I only saw the literal colors of the photo (a very light blue, and a dull brown gold) instead of interpolating white-gold or blue-black.

What color the dress actually is in real life? I have no idea.
What colors are in that image file? I'm quite certain, and later confirmed it with an image editor.

Re: White and Gold

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, for people who say,"who cares?", imagine if Newton ever said that when an apple fell on his head??? Someone else would have discovered gravity!!! :-D

On a serious note, I am not sure what I concluded above is correct...I am not a color scientist but this is something that my mind tells me that what is actually in the photo is in between what we all are seeing (irrespective of what the actual dress color is). No one knows the answer, we all are making theories....I am awaiting the day when this crowd sourcing will help us to get the real answer.

P.S. Too lazy to login

- Shahla (India)

Pixel Colours - Light Blue&Gold

[wylderide]

I can only see it as it appears in the image: as the pixel colours. http://knowyourmeme.com/photos...

Its obvious..

[Anonymous Coward]

Blue and Gold.

Not a good comic today

[Trogre]

That has to be one of the worst xkcd comics I've seen in a long time. The left picture shows a white and gold dress against a blue backdrop, and the right picture shows a blue and gold dress against a yellow backdrop. In neither picture does the "gold" look remotely like anything that could be called black.

I think a lot of this confusion is coming from the fact that the white balance of the picture is such that the blue fabric looks like evening light scattering off a white surface (a very light blue), so our eyes are interpreting that as the "white" point, and correcting everything else in the picture to match. So we have a way overexposed very dark object made to look like a slightly underexposed light object.

Blue Brown

[fox171171]

I can only see it as blue, period. Not trolling - I really cannot see this as white in any circumstances, even the XKCD "color balanced" bit I still see it as blue (albeit a much lighter blue on the left).

When I looked at the image, I saw a bluish and brownish dress.

In the XKCD image, I can say that they are both blue in color, with the dark room one being lighter blue in appearance to my eye, yet I know my interpretation would be more that it was in fact a white dress in a darkly lit area.

I have sunglasses that are brown tinted, and technically everything I see with them on has a brown tint to it, yet I know my brain is ignoring this (unless I am really thinking about it) and perceiving the colors for what I know they are. Your brain does an incredible amount of processing and interpretation of the things you see.

On reviewing the image again, I can see the over exposed background which does suggest the exposure of the dress itself is darkened, and therefore is white, or at least much lighter than it appears in the image.

I am reminded of this as well:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checker_shadow_illusion

What colour is the dress?

[mgcarley]

And the answer to this $64 question is: 50 shades of who gives a fuck.

The Emperor's New Clothes

[rkinch]

I see no dress at all. Check out the Emperor's New Clothes.

Here's a good read

[PJ6]

in case you're interested in learning more about color perception than the links provide.

http://blog.asmartbear.com/color-wheels.html

If you like that, there's even more to read on color theory.

Amazing!

[Gallomimia]

Something has actually gotten the sheeple interested in science!

This makes the news / slashdot??

[MoarSauce123]

Geez...the world doesn't have anything better to debate over? I think the dress looks hideous no matter what the color. There ya have it!

The trick is to remove the context...

[rgbatduke]

What color the dress is is impossible to tell from a photograph for countless reasons. What color the pixels in the photograph are is beyond question. They are light blue. One can simply box everything but a small patch of color from the dress and out of any context at all it is not white. If one has any real doubt, one can always go into the image itself and look at the RGB of the image.

The dress itself could be white, could be blue, could be grey -- and reflecting light from some blue source (like the sky, like a blue wall in the background behind the photographer). One would have to be there to know, since there are no other foreground objects to use to normalize our beliefs. But the pixels -- the pixels are what they are, and it ain't white or any of the nearly balanced fifty shades of grey.

rgb

BLUE AND BLACK ARE YOU KIDDING ME PEOPLE

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, here's the real issue: the idea is that anyone seeing the dress as white and gold is seeing the entire photo as "underexposed." you CANNOT tell me that ANY rational human being can say that the lighting in that pic is ANYTHING but massively OVERexposed. There are blown-out white highlights on the shoulder of that dress. The contrast is very low. It just is not possible in this universe or any other for the dress to be "underexposed." Anyone saying otherwise has never seen a photograph of anything before!!! And now, all that having been said... my sister in law, who is a photographer and artist, swears that the dress is white and gold. This means that it's all a plot to drive us insane. O.o.

Guys this is black and blue

[Anonymous Coward]

This is obviously blue and black

Black?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can argue about whether the (objectively very light blue) pixels should be seen as "white" or "blue". But anyone who sees the (objectively medium brown) areas as black clearly has either defective eyes or a defective monitor.

better question... is the dress on or off?

[swschrad]

One Genuine Internet Point, redeemable wherever Genuine Internet Points are honored, for the correct answer.

now everybody move on with their life.

I know my white sheets under blue light

[epine]

It appears to me as blue and black. Definitively. First viewed as a whole image, full screen on a tall portrait IPS and then checked on a second landscape IPS (these two screens long ago adjusted to show matched colours).

Both the black and blue appear to me somewhat blown out. Actually, the mottled black almost appears as a mutant non-colour unlike anything one sees in real life (the colour balance algorithm of a digital camera subtracting blue from the black is a perfect explanation for this).

If I scroll so that I can only see the top of the dress (down to just past the horizontal black band across her upper back) I can almost conceive of how some people see this dress as white and gold. What I actually perceive is an ambiguous image under false, untrustworthy light.

In my bedroom I have several unusual light sources which I regularly use. In addition to an incandescent lamp, there an extremely yellow bug lamp and a bright and narrow-spectrum blue LED light intended to shift circadian rhythm.

I love the yellow bug lamp because it's initially so dim I can turn it on briefly while my wife sleeps to find my socks, plus I often use it for reading late in my day so as not to expose myself to blue light. I also had red and green light sources for a while, before I discovered yellow bug-light perfection (the red and green bulbs were 40 W coloured-glass bulbs that constantly smelled bad because they instantly baked any stray dust—a failed experiment).

I have pretty good sense in my bedroom of which colours are more or less trustworthy under vastly different lighting conditions. Even under my narrow-spectrum blue light (in an otherwise dark bedroom) I can't make anything white look like this photograph. In my bedroom under a pure blue illumination (75% between 450 and 480 nm, centered at 464 nm; with 490 nm attenuated by 10 dB compared to the spectral peak) the highlights on my white sheets where the light is strongest are more saturated, and the dimmer regions are less saturated, opposite my impression of this photograph.

Perhaps people who spend a lot of time watching TV in dark rooms where people are wearing white clothing are conditioned differently.

dress

[Anonymous Coward]

I found it interesting that I saw it as lightt blue and gold. On my phone, or either monitor in the house. My favorite one, though, was from some wag posting as Helen_Keller on Facebook. She stated that the dress was black.